Molly Mead
June, 2001 molly.mead@tufts.edu

Author’s Note
The ideas contained in this paper were meant to provoke thought and change, both in mainstream foundations and in the women’s funding community. While I have had the good fortune to work in collaboration with many people who care about the important topic of gender and grantmaking, the ideas and conclusions in this paper are mine alone. Others may disagree with my arguments or conclusions. I wrote this paper to stimulate the next stage of an ongoing debate about the relevance of gender to grantmaking. I look forward to the expansion of that debate and to the actions that will follow.
Of course, I never could have written this paper alone. I want to acknowledge the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation, which funded the Women’s Philanthropy Cluster and, through them, commissioned and provided funding for this paper. And I want to thank the following people who talked with me about the role of gender in effective grantmaking, made comments on earlier drafts, and who have worked tirelessly and effectively to ensure that foundation grantmaking benefits women and girls: Carol Barton, Betsy Brill, Lynn Burbridge, Stephanie Clohesy, Tom David, Jean Entine,
Michelle Fine, Chris Grumm, Rob Hollister, Chris Kwak, Felicia Lynch, Carol Mollner, Susan
Ostrander, Kavita Ramdas, Ellen Remmer, Rebecca Riley, Jenny Russell, Peg Talburtt, Walteen
Grady Truly, and the members of the Young Sisters for Justice of the Boston Women’s Fund.
Editing and research assistance were provided by Gayle Goldin and Patricia Bull. And I especially want to acknowledge Mary Ellen Capek who got me started on this work, who made thoughtful suggestions every step of the way, and who is always a step ahead of me in her thinking.
Molly Mead
Tufts University

In 1992, the Executive Director of the National Council for Research on Women, Mary Ellen
Capek, stated publicly that having either the word "women" or "girls" in the name of an organization seeking foundation funding was the “kiss of death.” In short, it was a sure bet that such an organization would not be funded. Her statement reflected anecdotal evidence from foundation program officers, who had seen too many funding applications from women’s organizations be turned down because of their gender focus. Additionally, her pronouncement was buttressed by national and regional research studies, which documented how the philanthropic community responded to women and girls—neither supporting organizations for them proportionate to their population or their growing needs.
Even as Capek offered her grim but realistic assessment of the funding prospects for women and girls in 1992, a major national effort was underway to increase foundation funding for these programs. Both national and regional organizations were engaged in an interlocking set of activities designed to educate funders about women and girls and to provide them with solid evidence of the ineffectiveness and inequity of their own grantmaking practices. The assumption was that such evidence would be a powerful force for change.
What have been the results of these efforts? What (if anything) has changed since 1992 in funding for women and girls’ organizations? What is the best evidence today for why foundations should consider gender in their grantmaking? In addition, what strategies should advocates pursue to influence the ways foundations incorporate gender considerations in their grantmaking priorities?
In this paper, I answer the above questions by analyzing the most recent thinking about these issues. To do so, I have divided this paper into four sections:
I.
II.
III.
IV.
The Current Status of Foundation Funding for Women and Girls.
The Reasons to Incorporate Gender Analysis in Grantmaking.
The Use of Gender Analysis in International Grantmaking.
How to Change Foundations’ Approach to Gender in Their Grantmaking.
The Current Status of Foundation Funding for Women and Girls
National and regional data on the percentage of foundation funding for women and girls shows a consistent pattern on both the national and regional level: foundation funding for women and girls hovers in the range of 3% to just over 6% of total grantmaking. Research on grantmakers’ attitudes about funding women and girls shows the reasons for this funding pattern. The bottom line is that funders have a strong preference for funding so-called universal (or coeducational) programs, and little awareness of the need to consider gender when setting grantmaking priorities or allocating funds to grantees.
The Reasons to Incorporate Gender Analysis in Grantmaking

There are substantial reasons why grantmakers should systematically include an analysis of gender considerations in their grantmaking. Although gender is a socially constructed category it serves to both proscribe and constrain the life experiences; opportunities; access to resources; and, finally, power balance between women and men. Because of the power of gender to shape the lives of women and men, both individually and collectively, women are often differentially or disproportionately affected by many of the public problems that foundations profess to care about. In addition, women often benefit less from public policies that are developed (ostensibly) to benefit everyone equally . This can be a drag on democratic ideals. For all these reasons, it is imperative that funders incorporate gender analysis in their grantmaking—if they want it to be both effective and equitable.
A powerful case example of what can happen when grantmaking ignores the issue of gender is provided by coeducational youth-development programs for urban teenagers. I studied 25 such programs to see whether girls are being well served in these “universal” programs. What I learned is that girls and boys need some different programs and approaches because of differences in life experience and gender norms. Unfortunately, this is not recognized by these so-called universal programs. While gender differences in girls and boys are neither innate nor immutable, a program that aims to be fully effective for girls must incorporate gender considerations in its program design and operation. This is best done by exploring the social construction of gender and inviting young women and men to challenge gender norms, examine gender privilege, and create an even balance of power between girls and boys. Although my research focused on a narrow population (teenagers living in urban communities) and on only one type of program approach (youth development), my conclusions have potential applicability to other ages and other program approaches. To be effective for women and girls, programs need to take gender into account. To take one step back then, funders of these programs also need to take gender into account.
However, gender cannot be considered in isolation from other socially constructed categories that also constrain and determine access and opportunity. Thus, it will not suffice for grantmakers to incorporate a single gender lens in their grantmaking in order to be fully responsive to women’s social location. A uniform approach is likely to lead to ineffective grantmaking as well as legitimate resistance. Recent scholarship done on race, class, gender, and sexuality has helped us understand that there is no one gendered existence. The ways in which the category of gender shapes lives and constrains opportunities is historically and geographically contextual.
In addition, women and men are not simply gendered beings. Individually and collectively, our race, our socioeconomic class, and our sexuality shape all of us, to name other important categories of social group membership. What this means in the United States, for example, is that the experiences and opportunities of white, upper middle- class women are often quite different from white working-class women, and different yet again from women of color.
Ironically, grantmakers who understand these differences have proven to be a major source of resistance to adopting a gender lens. These grantmakers, when presented with arguments that they should adopt a gender lens in their grantmaking, have correctly responded that issues of race and class operate in powerful ways and must also be considered in their work. A way out of this dilemma is to think about gender lenses, or, even better, gender analysis—vs. a single gender lens—to acknowledge the simultaneous existence of several socially constructed group memberships. This could result in better grantmaking and a more powerful consensus about the

need to incorporate gender in grantmaking. Although there are some daunting practical challenges associated with adopting gender analysis—namely that it requires well-trained program officers—it is imperative if the desired outcome is the most effective grantmaking possible.
I conclude Section II with a summary of the literature on universal and targeted funding and place this discussion in the larger public policy debate about universal and targeted policy approaches. Defining the concepts universal and targeted as a binary can be misleading because oppositional thinking forces a set of either/or choices that is neither realistic nor optimal. Indeed, it is both possible and desirable to combine the best elements of universal funding and targeted funding in a way that results in grantmaking that is both efficient, effective, and popular.
Unfortunately, many of the efforts to increase foundation funding for women and girls have had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the notion that universal and targeted funding are contradictory choices—one of which works to women’s advantage and one of which does not.
Because most of our work had the effect of focusing attention on foundation grantmaking to programs specifically designed for women and girls, we helped create the conclusion that the only way to advance women was to engage in targeted grantmaking. I now believe that targeted grants are one viable approach to advancing the lives of women and girls, but that universal grantmaking can work just as well if it is done as part of a “gender and” analysis.)
What goal should foundations strive for? Based on current research, they should fund a mix of effective programs. Just as there is evidence about the need for gender-specific programs for women and girls, there is also evidence backing up reasons to have universal programs that pay appropriate attention to gender. But the current funding percentages do not , on the face of it, appear to be justifiable. [In Boston the breakdown is: 92% coeducational, 6% all-female, 2% allmale]. The funding for all-female programs seems especially low, given current evidence about the ways in which universal institutions underserve women.
The Use of Gender Analysis in International Grantmaking
International grantmakers, whose mission is to advance “developing” countries, provide a powerful contrast to grantmaking practices in the United States. Gender analysis is widely accepted in international development to produce effective grantmaking. This understanding was not arrived at overnight, and there is still a long way to go to ensure that the practice in these international agencies equals the [theoretical] commitment to advancing women’s lives. Still, there is much to learn from the international experience; arguably, it is well ahead of where we are domestically.
There has been a 40 year evolution in the thinking about gender in international development— an evolution that is particularly instructive because it correlates to similar concerns in the United
States about using gender analysis here. In its early days, gender analysis in international grantmaking led to programs that "problematized" women; defined and then maintained women’s status as helpless victims of larger socioeconomic forces; and excluded women as major players in any aspect of the analysis, the grantmaking, or the funding of programs. Since those early missteps, however, both the thinking and the practice have evolved simultaneously in

several different directions, each of which has its own strengths and weak-nesses in terms of advancing the status of women. Nonetheless, all offer lessons for U.S. grantmakers.
How to Change Foundations’ Approach to Gender in Their Grantmaking
The evidence presented in this paper leads to one conclusion: foundations must incorporate gender analysis in their grantmaking if they want their work to be effective.
The lessons learned from international grantmaking show that this could be accomplished, yet efforts thus far to change domestic grantmaking practices have been ineffective. The bottom line is that the percentage of foundation funding for programs for women and girls has changed very little in the past ten years.
We must ask once again, What can be done to ensure that gender analysis is institutionalized in the foundation world? There will not be a single answer to this question. As with all attempts to change well-established practices of major institutions, we will need to develop a multiplicity of approaches. We may not even agree what those approaches should be.
In Section IV of this paper, I begin by exploring what could be done to change grantmaking practices of US-based foundations. To start this dialogue, I survey the relatively meager literature on how to change foundation behavior. What I conclude is that foundation grantmaking behavior needs to be understood on several levels simultaneously. Foundations are both rational and irrational in their decision making: t hey are influenced not only by carefully presented research evidence but also by internal and external pressures. My analysis, therefore, argues for a multi-pronged change strategy, offering evidence of the continuing relevance of gender to grantmaking; education of domestic funders on the institutionalization of gender analysis in international grantmaking; and a carefully orchestrated internal and external campaign for change.

By now many of us know that there is a bias in organized philanthropy against funding programs that are designed specifically for women and girls. In the aggregate, foundations give a very small percentage (usually 6% or less) of their funding to programs specifically designed to work with women and girls. This section explores the reasons behind this funding pattern.
Universal Programs
Program officers and executive directors of foundations have a strong preference for funding universal programs (programs that serve males and females) over gender-specific programs, and they do not include gender as a major determinant when they set funding priorities. In general, most foundation staffs are convinced that their current approach (developing funding priorities without considering gender and funding universal, non-gender specific programs) is adequate and even preferable for meeting the needs of women and girls.
Foundation staff members do express interest in the need to alleviate the most pressing problems of women and girls and to create programs that develop their strengths and pave the way to full and active membership in a civil society. Perhaps most important, they are convinced that their current funding priorities do just that —a viewpoint very much disputed herein.
At first glance, it might seem that the patterns of foundation funding are relatively irrelevant to nonprofit programs, since foundations typically provide a relatively small percentage of an organization’s funding. In the aggregate, foundation funding provides approximately 12% of the budgets of programs for women and girls. Yet foundation funding comprises a much larger percentage of the budgets of the smaller and newer organizations. In Boston, for example, foundation funding accounts for 40% of the funding of organizations with budgets under $125,000; 69% of the funding of organizations with budgets under $37,000; and 51% of the funding of the newest organizations: those in existence for less than three years (Mead, 1994). What these figures show is that foundations play an particularly significant role in supporting innovation and in funding organizations that might have trouble getting funds elsewhere.
National and Regional Research on Funding For Women and Girls
According to national figures compiled by The Foundation Center for grants awarded in 1999 only 6 .4% of all foundation dollars were designated for programs that specifically benefit women and girls (Lawrence, Gluck, & Ganguly, 2001). Researchers have been tracking this percentage since the 1970s, when two reports focused the attention of the philanthropic world on the relatively small proportion of foundation dollars that were intentionally directed to women and girls. In 1975, Mary Jane Tully reported in Foundation News that less than .5% of all foundation funding went to programs specifically for women and girls. In 1979, the Ford
Foundation issued a report documenting that [in 1976] only .6% of the more than $2 billion in foundation grants were specifically designated to benefit women and girls (Ford Foundation,
1979).

Since 1981, The Foundation Center has tracked grants to women and girls. In order to be classified as a grant to women and girls, a grant must meet one of the following four requirements:
(1) Women and girls make up a substantial majority of either the members or
clients of the agency or program.
(2) The agency or program is intended to increase participation by, or extend services to, women or girls.
(3) The agency or program addresses an issue or discipline as it affects women or girls.
(4) The agency or program addresses an issue or discipline whose impact is primarily upon women and girls.
Although grants classified as being made specifically to women and girls do not reflect the total amount of funding that reaches women and girls, they do reflect grants purposefully targeted to them . In that respect, the dollars of giving reported by The Foundation Center reflect grantmakers’ intentional and specific funding for women and girls. One can conclude, therefore, that these percentages are an important indication of how philanthropists view the need for programs designed for women and girls .
The Foundation Center’s data has several limitations that are worth mentioning. First, many women’s funds argue that an important component is absent from the classification criteria—that an organization is controlled by women
(as represented by staff leadership and board membership). Second, the data excludes grants under $10,000. While no one argues that this exclusion significantly skews the total, it does render invisible the important work of many women’s funds, which typically receive grants under $10,000. Because there is another organization (The Women’s
Funding Network) that does track and report all grantmaking (without exclusions) by women’s funds, it would be ideal if The Foundation Center could incorporate this data as well into their reports.
Although the percentage of foundation dollars to programs for women and girls from 1975 to
1999 increased in this 21-year period from .5% to 6.4%, even the latest percentage continues to reflect a minuscule portion of philanthropic dollars. Based on the foregoing, it is clear that funding programs specifically for women and girls is not a priority to the majority of foundations.
To those people interested in gender equity in philanthropy, the amount of funding available for programs for women and girls is a major concern. Both national and regional interest groups have tracked and documented funding for programs for women and girls over the last 10 years in an effort to increase that funding. Women and Philanthropy has played a leadership role in this effort. In a series of reports entitled Far from Done , they addressed gender issues in philanthropy in several ways. In their first report (Bonavoglia, 1989), they presented information on the lives of women and girls in the United States and advocated grantmaking strategies that were responsive to the status of women and girls. In their second report (1990), they noted the racial and gender composition of boards of trustees and hypothesized a link “between patterns of grantmaking and patterns of leadership in philanthropy” (p. 1). In their 1992 report, Getting It
Done: from Commitment to Action on Funding for Women and Girls, they reported and analyzed
The Foundation Center's data on grants designated for women and girls, by dollar and percentage of total funding from 1981 to1990 (Bonavoglia, 1992). As mentioned above, the percentage of total funding has increased slightly over that time, but not steadily and certainly not markedly.

In addition to the national focus on funding for women and girls, there have been a number of regional research studies examining the same issue. In 1990, Women Working in Philanthropy
(an affiliate group of Delaware Valley Grantmakers) conducted a study of local grantmakers to document (1) their allocations for women and girls and (2) the composition of their boards of directors. Their conclusions were that grants to women's organizations in 1988 represented 5.1% of total discretionary giving and women accounted for about 25% of total board members of the foundations sampled.
In 1992, Chicago Women In Philanthropy issued a report, ShortSighted: How Chicago-Area
Grantmakers Can Apply a Gender Lens To See the Connections Between Social Problems and
Women's Needs (Servatius, 1992) .
The research found that 3.2% of the dollars awarded by
Chicago-area grantmakers in 1990 went to women and girls. They also learned that these funders generally did not see a need to view their funding decisions in gender-specific terms.
i
Three additional reports on funding for women mirror similar findings. Women and Philanthropy conducted research in two U.S. regions during the early 1990s: Wisconsin and North
Carolina/the Southeast. From 1985 to1990, foundations in Wisconsin gave 3% of their total allocations to programs serving women and girls (Chakravartty, 1992). In North Carolina during the same period, funding for women's programs averaged 4.3% of all foundation grants.
(Chakravartty, 1991). A second funding report on 1991 philanthropy in Minnesota (by the
Minnesota Council of Nonprofits) documented that the 40 largest foundations gave just 4.5% of their total grants to women (Eberhart & Pratt, 1993).
Because these regional figures are remarkably similar to the comparable national figures
(reported by Women and Philanthropy), they appear to form a national pattern of both philanthropic giving and board representation. They indicate a pervasive and consistent pattern of funding allocations to programs for women and girls and raise questions about why such a pattern exists. i The Chicago research study was greatly assisted by a pre-existing data base, developed by the Donors Forum in Chicago, which tracks grantmaking by a variety of classifications, including gender. Few other areas of the country have such a data base, so others wanting to document funding patterns in their region must either develop the data base (a time consuming and expensive proposition) or rely on the Foundation
Center’s data which includes a smaller sample of grantmakers by region than is ideal.

The Reasons Behind the Current Approach to Funding Women and Girls
The primary goal of the research studies reviewed above was to document and disseminate data about the percentage of foundation funding allocated to programs for women and girls. The assumption of the researchers seems to have been that documenting the consistently small proportion of funds made available to programs specifically for women and girls would in and of itself raise serious equity issues in the minds of funders and, therefore, lead to a change in funding priorities. There is little evidence that this has occurred. The research did serve as a vehicle to begin conversations within and across foundations about gender equity issues, but it did not lead to a dramatic change that many had wanted.
Where Funding Goes
The research on funding patterns in Greater Boston may serve to explain why . This study of foundation allocations to programs for women and girls asked two additional questions, which were natural outgrowths from the earlier studies: (1) Where does the 95% of foundation allocations go? and (2) Why are the allocation patterns the way they are? (Mead, 1994)
In the Greater Boston area, 92% of foundation dollars goes to universal programs; 6% goes to programs for women and girls; and 2% goes to programs for men and boys. Overall, funders overwhelmingly give their money to programs that do not specify a gender focus.
ii This finding raises a central question: Are universal programs effective for women and girls? It turns out that most foundations simply assume the answer is yes. Unfortunately, they do not have the data to support their assumption.
Funders Assumptions About Where Funding Should Go
Only 20% of the funders surveyed in the Greater Boston Study think that funders have historically underfunded women and girls’ programs. Most (61%) believe that their current funding strategies appropriately benefit women and girls. Funders in Greater Boston cite a variety of reasons for preferring universal programs. In focus groups and individual inter- views they revealed the reasons why they prefer universal over gender-specific programs.
Their responses can be grouped into five categories, each of which reveals serious flaws in thinking. (Flaws in their logic will be examined in the Section II.) ii These Foundation Center numbers are, at best, only a rough approximation of the actual relative funding levels for greater Boston programs. Through our survey of funders we attempted to obtain more accurate figures about support for programs for women and girls, but too few funders were able to provide us with information about the gender composition of their grantees. The Foundation Center’s data on Boston area funders is part of a national sample that seeks to represent nationwide funding patterns.
The data was not intended for use on a regional basis and does not claim to be representative of the variety of funders found in our region. Since it is the only figure available I use it as a starting point in this paper for the discussion about the relationship between philanthropic giving and gender.

Efficiency: Given limited grantmaking dollars, the best investment is to give the money to nongender-specific programs. Some grantmakers conclude that programs that serve both males and females are a better investment than programs that work with only one gender. Two-fifths of the Greater Boston
Study respondents specifically oppose a gender focus because, as one stated, “we have limited resources and want to reach the broadest audience with our funding.” Another program officer stated his view in very practical terms: “If we get two proposals for similar programs, one to work with males and females and one to work with just females, we would probably fund the male and female program.”
Democracy: Targeted programs promote exclusivity. Most foundation and corporate- giving program staff are interested in a democratic society. Some grantmakers view gender-specific programs as promoting exclusivity and creating separate worlds.
To these foundation professionals, the idea of a single-sex program is counterintuitive. They posit that the advancement of girls and women is likely to occur in programs that treat male and female constituents equally and therefore identically. These funders conclude that a gender-specific program runs counter to the gender equity they imagine for society. Others conclude that a female-focused program operates too far out of the mainstream of society. As one executive director stated in an interview, “organizations that are run by women, that exclude men, and whose purpose is to advocate for women in a political context are too exclusionary and go too far.”
Efficacy: Targeting hurts women and girls.
Some philanthropic staff think it is counterproductive to the interests of women and girls to create programs that work exclusively with them. They point out that the world consists of men and women.
They question whether females can ever gain equity with males if they don’t learn to live with and confront the gender inequities that occur. As one program officer stated,
“In an ideal world, I hope that there will be no more boys’ clubs and that we will have only boys' and girls' organizations. There are girls’ and women’s issues, but they have to be addressed systemically. I don’t think that an after-school program for girls can really change self esteem, especially when girls live every day in classrooms with teachers who favor boys.”
Relevance: Gender is an irrelevant category for targeting.
Some grantmakers believe that gender is not relevant when they make strategic decisions about their grantmaking. As one foundation executive director put it, “In the Boston grantmaking community women’s funding is a non-issue. The lines are drawn more on social, cultural, and economic dimensions. Gender is not a critical criteria.” This category of grantmakers concludes that there may be reasons why it is legitimate to fund programs that serve a specifically defined constituency and that such programs do not violate previously defined concerns about efficiency or democracy. Yet they do not conclude that gender constitutes an appropriately defined constituency. They argue that there are reasons to fund programs that serve a racial, ethnic, or economic constituency, but there are not good reasons to fund programs that serve a constituency defined by gender.
As one program officer put it, “It is easier to sell ethnic than gender advocacy. It is harder to be convinced of the need for women to organize as a separate group compared with those who have such barriers as language or recent immigration and who lack the resources most women have.”
We Don’t Fund Women: Our organization's philosophy and mission does not include a focus on women. Some funders said that their entire grantmaking strategy obviates consideration of gender as a category—either because they don’t fund specific population groups or because they don’t identify women or girls as a category relevant to their mission, their funding guidelines, or their founder’s intention.
Rather, in some foundations, grantmaking criteria point in other directions. As an executive director of one foundation said, “We want to fund communities, not specific populations.” Another executive director noted, “Our primary focus is to fund low-income people as they reside in the neighborhood setting. There are times when there is a challenge between the fit with a proposal that is just framed as addressing women’s and girls’ needs, and our neighborhood framework.”
Examining Funders' Assumptions About Gender

At first, it may seem that these categories of responses merely illustrate the existence of a set of logical criteria to determine whether a foundation will consider gender in funding decisions.
Further analysis, however, uncovers major limitations in their thought processes, revealing that their funding criteria is based (in part) on a lack of understanding of both gender as a relevant category in grantmaking and the role that programs for women and girls plays in their lives.
Reason #1
Efficiency: You cannot be efficient if you are not effective. While funders are justifiably concerned with efficiency in their grantmaking, a grantee agency is not automatically efficient because its constituents are male and female. A universal agency must work reasonably well for its entire constituency in order to merit funding. However, the
Greater Boston Study revealed that funders usually do not ask universal programs to report even the most general evaluation data by gender. As a result, funders do not know how well these programs are serving the needs of women and girls.
Reason #2
Democracy: Single-sex programs can produce democratic outcomes. Funders concerned about democracy must examine their assumption that single-sex programs are automatically anti-democratic.
Research, in fact, has shown that programs designed exclusively for a “minority” group often develop strengths in that group that allow them to function even more effectively in the “majority” world. Studies comparing coeduca-tional with single-sex schools, for example, support the view that single-sex schools produce better outcomes for girls in both cognitive and social measures (Riordan, 1990; Moore, Piper, and
Schaefer, 1992, Sadker and Sadker, 1994). Women who attended single-sex colleges have higher educational and occupational achievement, higher self-esteem and more supportive views of equal sex roles than women who attended coeducational colleges (Riordan, 1990).
Reason #3
Efficacy: Girls have plenty of opportunities to learn how to live on an equal footing with boys. There is no need to recreate sexism. The funders whose attitudes are captured in the efficacy argument described above make a revealing assumption about program effectiveness—that women and girls, by being forced to encounter sexism, learn necessary survival skills when they participate in universal programs, skills that are not developed in single-sex programs. This is both a harsh view of gender relations and also assumes that women and girls should be "toughened up" to deal with sexism rather than believing sexism can or should be challenged. It is hard to imagine, if funders reflected carefully on their own reasoning, that they would continue to suggest that funding sexist programs helps prepare girls for a sexist world. Yet that is what this reasoning amounts to.
Reason #4
Relevance: Women are found in all the other “categories” funders consider relevant and their needs are often different from the men in those categories. The assump-tions embedded in the argument that
“targeting” by race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status is appropriate, whereas gender is not, are the most troubling because they reveal that funders equate women with white, upper middle class women, and they equate racial constituencies with men. This assumption makes invisible the many women of color and lowincome women who are served by (and also run) programs for women and girls. It keeps in place a double bind for women of color: that “women” are white and “people of color” are male. In fact, the boards, staff, and constituents of most programs for women and girls are racially diverse. Again in contradiction to some funders’ assumptions, these are not organizations exclusively for or run by white women.
In 24% of the organizations surveyed in the Greater Boston Study, people of color account for the majority of staff. In 33% of the organizations, the majority of clients are people or color. In 18% the majority of board members are people of color; and in 12% the director is a woman of color. Overall, the organizations in this study report that 47% of their clients are white. Roughly a quarter are African American,13 % are
Latina, 5% are Asian and less than 1% are Native American Indian. The racial diversity of these

organizations is especially significant in light of the region’s overall demographics: 83% of the girls and
90% of the women who live in Greater Boston are white.
Reason #5
Make Women Visible: You will have more success accomplishing the mission of your foundation.
The funders who say that gender simply does not fit anywhere into their grantmaking (because the focus of their foundation is in entirely different areas), often fail to see women at all. Women and girls, after all, live in neighborhoods and often play important roles in the conditions of those neighborhoods, and more women than men live in poverty. So, a foundation concerned with community development or with low income people might naturally also be interested in the role of gender in these issues. However, the responses above indicate that they do not make this connection. In many funders’ minds gender is a discrete category which is treated as separate and distinct from categories like community or income level.
This way of thinking about gender must be addressed if funders are to ever change their approach to funding women and girls. Otherwise women will be viewed as being in a {win-lose} competition with other groups not defined along gender dimensions, but which also have equity interests.
The Increased Presence of Women in Foundations
The rapid increase in the numbers of women program officers and executive directors of foundations has not had a marked effect on funding for programs for women and girls. It remains to be seen if this will change in the future as women become even more established in their careers in philanthropy. In interviews with me, women staff indicated that several phenomena affect how or whether they advocate for programs for women and girls. Some women reported their reluctance to advocate strongly for funding for women’s programs. These women were concerned that they would be labeled as single-issue funders and then be marginalized within their funding institution. Within this group, some had abandoned their interest in women and girls to advance their careers; others felt the best strategy was to advocate quietly to fund women and girls. Other women funders reported that they had no particular focus on funding for women and girls and resented that they might automatically be assumed to have an interest in this issue. Finally, women in foundations argued that they had little control over funding decisions. This is borne out in the Greater Boston research, which showed that the board of trustees sets funding criteria in 70% of the Boston-area foundations. In any case, these interviews reveal the fact that increased gender diversity in the staff of foundations has not created a profoundly different reception to the proposals of programs for women and girls.
The question is, can funding for programs for women and girls be compared with funding for programs that intentionally focus on men and boys? In a social context that favors males over females (either intentionally or unintentionally), we know there are some universal programs that work better for men and boys. Studies of our educational and court systems iii show that when gender is considered invisible or irrelevant, men and boys are favored, and women and girls are disadvantaged or harmed. Because of this, men and boys are less likely to need separate programs focused just on them. They can be well served by a funding strategy that gives iii For a study on gender bias in the courts see: Committee on Gender Equality of the
Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “Gender Bias Study of the Court System in Massachusetts.” Boston Supreme Judicial Court. For a study on gender bias in our public schools see: “The AAUW Report: How Schools Shortchange
Girls.” Washington, DC: American Association of University Women, January, 1991.

precedence to universal programs. Because of the social and economic conditions in their lives, women and girls often are less well served by programs that ignore gender issues.
For women and girls, what are the implications of the current state of foundation funding? What does it mean for them that 92% of funding goes to universal programs that aim to serve both genders or that do not specify any gender focus? As Section II of this paper will shows, probing questions need to be asked of these universal programs:

1. Are some of these programs ostensibly for both genders but in fact geared toward the
needs and circumstances of men and boys?
2. Are these programs doing the most they can to benefit women and girls?
3. Are the programs designed to be responsive to the conditions of women’s and girls’
lives?
4. Do the programs address gender inequities and encourage both males and females to
move beyond a limited definition of appropriate gender roles?
Of course, universal programs have the potential to be effective for women and girls. However, without careful attention to gender issues, they also can miss opportunities to benefit women and girls. Funders of these programs have an important role to play to ensure program effectiveness.
As Section II will show, funders must incorporate gender analysis in their grantmaking to ensure that universal programs are appropriately designed and to recognize and support well-designed single sex programs.

II. THE RELEVANCE OF GENDER TO FOUNDATION GRANTMAKING
Introduction
Despite their many differences, foundations have one thing in common: they seek to fund organizations that are effective in accomplishing their goals and objectives. The primary reason, then, why foundations need to consider gender in their grantmaking is that many of the programs they fund simply are not as effective as they could be because they fail to incorporate gender considerations in their design and implementation. This section will discuss the need to consider gender in the design, implementation and leadership of the programs that foundations support.
Unfortunately, there has been a trend in the last twenty years to de-emphasize gender in program design; ironically, this de-emphasis has arisen in part from efforts to ensure gender equity.
Simply put, efforts to equalize women’s status with men’s often have been equated with the idea that a woman can do anything that a man can. This idea made sense as a strategy to ensure that women gain entrée into previously male domains and programs; but it also resulted in a blurring of the recognition that there continue to be significant disparities in access to resources and opportunities between men and women. It also had the unintended effect of continuing to hold men as the standard to which women should be compared.
At one time, the rationale for paying attention to gender in program design was the supposition that women and men were inherently different, and women, as the subordinate group, needed special programs to compensate for those differences. This rationale has [and rightly so] been challenged. The challenge, however, often resulted in the opposite conclusion—that women and men are just the same and therefore universal programs should work as well for a woman as for a man. In practice, this has often resulted in women’s admission into [formerly all-male] programs that were designed to work well [only] for men. While research has indeed shown there are few inherent differences between women and men, there are profound differences in the socialization of gender that impact women’s and men’s lives.
The central case, then, for the relevance of gender to program effectiveness rests on the fact that men and women are socialized very differently, with different expectations about appropriate behavior and social roles, and that society holds men and women to different standards of behavior. This different socialization leads to different life experiences and opportunities that can result in quite profound gender disparities in access to tangible and intangible resources.
If these programs want to be fully effective, they must pay attention to these differences.
Foundations can play an important role in this context. First, they can fund established programs that have a strong track record of working effectively for women. Second, they can motivate programs to incorporate gender concerns by including gender criteria in grantmaking decisions.
However, foundations (and programs) cannot pay attention to gender in isolation from other socially-constructed categories such as race and class. As with gender, people’s lives are profoundly shaped by racial, cultural and class contexts, which impact experiences and opportunities. Well-designed programs need to pay attention to gender considerations in

conjunction with race and class considerations. Foundations need to do the same. Although it may seem obvious that race, class and gender altogether shape individual and group experience, it is actually easy to lose sight of this fact. This is due in large part to the fact that the predominant image of a woman is white, professional, and upper-middle class, despite the fact that most women in the United States are not white and upper-middle class.
This misconception obscures the fact that gender, race and class are inextricable; that one is not lived without the other. When we lose sight of the intersection of race, class and gender we can fall into thinking that race and gender are opposite categories, only one of which can be considered at a time. This false dichotomy is evident in foundations that include racial criteria in their grantmaking but not gender criteria. This practice pits white women against people of color and excludes women of color altogether. The way out of this conundrum is to recognize and analyze the intersection of race and class with gender both in programs and in the funding of those programs.
This section concludes with a discussion of the relevance of gender to youth development programs. The evolution of youth programs provides a powerful, concrete example of the ideas presented in the remainder of this section. Previously, youth programs were primarily singlesex. This separation was grounded in the widely accepted [but false] belief that boys and girls were inherently and inevitably quite different from each other with totally different needs, strengths, and interests. When that belief began to be questioned, and when the disparity in numbers of youth programs for girls was identified, there was a strong push to open up boys programs to girls.
The new thinking about gender was that boys and girls were not so different from each other after all, and hence would do equally well in the same program. In practice, however, many girlonly programs went out of operation; boys programs became coed; and girls then had to fit into programs designed for boys. Finally, the new thinking about gender often failed to account for socialized gender differences that resulted in girls and boys having different life experiences.
What the youth program example shows is that effective programs need to recognize and challenge the socialization of gender.
The discussion of the relevance of gender to grantmaking continues in Section III, where I discuss the well-established role for gender analysis in international grantmaking. In the arena of international development there is strong and widely accepted evidence that development programs come closer to achieving their goals when women are considered in the design, implementation and evaluation of development activities. In this arena, the current direction is to develop both universal and women-only programs that pay specific attention to the needs of women and that involve women in the design and delivery of the programs.

Gender Matters
The fact that women and men are socialized differently and held to different standards of behavior by society means that programs must incorporate gender in program design, implementation and leadership to be fully effective. The following categories provide specific examples of the different ways gender “matters.” The first five examples argue for thoughtfully designed programs that might be either coeducational or single-sex. The last three examples argue for the need for well-designed, gender-specific programs.
1. Disproportionate impact of specific public problems.
In some instances, because of their social roles, women and girls are more affected by a specific problem or issue than are men or boys. For example, it is well-documented that there are significantly more women than men living in poverty. This is primarily due to two factors: labor-market segregation and women’s significantly greater role in raising children. Overall, women work in jobs that pay less [than men]. Moreover, because they often work fewer paid hours due to childcare responsibilities, this results in more women [than men] being poor. Therefore, poverty and all its attendant issues have a greater impact on women than men. A program concerned with issues of poverty or works with poor people then needs to do a gender analysis to verify that it is effectively reaching the group most affected .
2. Differential impact.
Women and girls also can be impacted differently [than men and boys] by a problem. For example, the opportunistic infections which women typically manifest when they have full-blown AIDS are different from the opportunistic infections that men manifest.
Before this difference was recognized, women with AIDS were excluded from receiving any of the benefits of programs which were designated for all people with AIDS, but designed according to a male definition of a person with AIDS. Although the variation in opportunistic infections stems from a biological difference between women and men, the male-centered definition of an AIDS diagnosis arose from the still widespread practice of making male health the norm for everyone. Spending less money on research on women and AIDS or basing a definition of AIDS only on men’s diseases is a social issue, not a biological one. Programs designed specifically for women with AIDS were at the forefront in advocating for the needs of women with AIDS, pushing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to change its definition of
AIDS, so that women could receive the federal and state services that accompany an AIDS diagnosis.
3. The different social roles that women and girls occupy (e.g., raising children) also argue for differences in program design. Labor-market segregation, resulting in lower wages for women compared to men, needs to be addressed in job-training programs for women. Additionally, if they expect women to participate in such programs as substance-abuse treatment, programs must take into account the childcare responsibilities that many women hold.
4. The different socialization of women and girls should also result in the need for appropriately designed programs. In general, women and girls are socialized to play a caretaking role and to be subservient to men and boys. Thus, when women and girls are in mixed-gender groups, they may talk less, may venture fewer opinions, and may be reluctant to engage in verbal conflicts. All of these behaviors will influence the success of a program. In a coed leadership

program, for example, girls may be less willing to engage in behaviors that are traditionally associated with leadership. Such a program will need to design specific approaches to counter this socialization if it expects to work as well for girls as for boys.
5. Gender socialization can also result in different opportunities available to women and girls.
Despite little difference in inherent mathematical ability, for example, girls take fewer advanced math and science courses than boys. This significantly constrains future career choices.
A recent report indicated that there continues to be a wide gender gap in Internet usage: 65% male vs. 35% female. This is a serious problem given the great promise this technology shows for facilitating the exchange of information and ideas. Women and girls, unfortunately, may not view electronic communication as within their comprehension. A program designed to take advantage of the information super highway will need to pay specific attention to this gender gap or run the risk of perpetuating it.
Sometimes Women-Only Programs Make the Most Sense
The examples provided above all make explicit the ways in which gender matters very much in program design and implementation. They each refute the contention of those foundation professionals who believe that gender is not relevant to their grantmaking. They don’t, however, resolve the debate about whether women and girls are better served in universal or single-sex programs. If a universal program acknowledges the multiple ways gender socialization affects its constituents, it can develop an effective program for women and men. However, single-sex programs can offer some advantages that universal programs, no matter how well designed, cannot. These advantages are summarized below:
1. Avoiding feeling like the "other." There is considerable evidence that, in many ways, men and boys are viewed as "normal" and women and girls are viewed as "other." For example, an often-repeated study by Broverman (1972) shows that men and women rate the qualities we generally associate with the male role as being identical with the qualities of a psychologically healthy person. The qualities normally associated with the female role were virtually identical with the qualities of a psychologically unhealthy person. All too often, girls and women are compared to boys and men and found wanting. In a program in which every participant is female, the issue of being “other” recedes into the background, and participants can concentrate more on being themselves, working to develop their unique capacities and identities. It is ironic yet true that in a single-sex program, the issue of gender can become a non-issue and other concerns can then take precedence.
2. Feeling safe and being safe.
Another reason to provide programs for women and girls is that they can feel more comfortable and safer in an all-female environment. The issue of safety is hardly trivial. Women and girls are less safe in their homes than they are in public places and they are used to feeling unsafe in environments that men and boys perceive as safe. For too many women and girls, unfortunately, men and boys are the greatest threat to their safety, and too often this includes men and boys enrolled in universal programs. Women who are homeless, for example, often report that a homeless shelter is the choice of last resort because of the frequent sexual violence occurring there. Girls in coed-youth programs report high levels of sexual

harassment by the boys in those programs. Sometimes the location itself of a universal program is so unsafe that it presents an overwhelming barrier for women and girls.
3. Women and girls are in charge.
Typically, women and girls run single-sex programs for women and girls. In my research on nonprofit programs in Greater Boston, I found that every program for women and girls is run by a woman director, and 97 % of these programs have a female majority on their board (Mead, 1994). This means two things: (1) programs for women and girls are controlled by women and girls; and (2) programs for women and girls are also an arena for women and girls to develop and exercise their leadership abilities.
Single-Sex Programs Can Be More Democratic
What I have discussed above offers a framework for understanding why an individual program needs to incorporate gender in order to be fully effective for all its constituents. In addition, there is an overarching reason to have an integrated set of programs that works well for women: within such an integrated system a strong democratic potential is found. A concern of many funders is that programs specifically for women are somehow anti-democratic and contradict the ideal that everyone should be welcome in every program and able to succeed in that program. In fact, the opposite may be true. Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider (1993) argue that in a truly democratic society every group would be, at one time or another, the clearly deserving recipients of public-policy benefits. In looking at who benefits from public policies, Ingram and Schneider posit the existence of four groups: (1) the advantaged , those politically powerful and socially acceptable groups that typically benefit from public policies and are regarded as deserving of the benefits; (2) the contenders , those groups that fight for public-policy benefits but are not regarded as automatically deserving of such benefits; (3) the dependents , those groups with little political power that are viewed as deserving of assistance but unable to help themselves; and (4) the deviants , those groups whose behavior is (in some way) judged socially unacceptable, and for whom punitive public policies are designed.
When the policy design process operates with reasonable fairness, different interest groups within society—including social, racial, and employment groups—are subject to different constructions when they are the targets of different policies... As long as social constructions are dynamic, self-correcting forces in the system prevent any group from becoming permanently disenfranchised. When these mechanisms do not work, democracy suffers (p. 85).
One could argue that women and girls are seen too often as the dependents of public policy and seen too seldom as the contenders or the advantaged. One very important role for gender- specific programs is to change that public-policy dynamic. An additional category must be added to the four Ingram and Schneider categories: the invisible . Invisible people are those who have legitimate public concerns but who cannot get their concerns recognized or put on the public policy agenda. For example, women died of AIDS for years without being officially recognized or being able to receive the benefits available to those with the official diagnosis.
Similarly, women have been the victims of domestic violence for centuries, but it is only in the

past few years that women's groups have succeeded in bringing that problem to the public consciousness and insisted there be an appropriate array of public responses.
One important function of programs for women and girls, then, is to move them along this continuum of policy beneficiaries. The first step is to move women and girls out of the invisible category: to take their problems seriously, to document them, and to define them as public problems. The second step is to ensure that women and girls are not put into the deviant category. At this point in history, society views poor women who do not work as deviant—they are deemed lazy and lacking motivation. Recently, punitive policies were designed to force women back into the workplace. Programs for women and girls play an important role in countering this perception of deviance by pointing out that women with few employable skills and children to raise are not likely to succeed in the labor market—at least not without considerable support.
The third step is for programs to move women and girls out of the dependent category. They can do this in two ways: change public misperceptions of the capabilities of women and girls, and improve the skills of women and girls so they are able to take charge of their own lives. Then programs for women and girls can make them contenders . Political organizations focused on the needs of women and girls, advocacy organizations, and networks of women and girls all serve as vehicles for women and girls to contend with other groups for the benefits of public policy. Finally, programs for women and girls can move females into the advantaged category, securing their unchallenged right to benefit from certain public policies.
Research on Gender Differences
All of the discussion above rests on the assumption that there are meaningful differences between women and men. How do we make sense of those differences? A brief look at the enormous body of research on gender differences shows the lack of inherent differences, in contrast to evidence of widely assumed differences. This literature suggests why many program staff members are understandably confused as to how they should think about gender when they design their programs. When staff hear about research that shows few inherent differences between women and men, they may readily conclude that a one-size-fit-all approach to program design will work just fine, although they will be disappointed when they apply this approach.
Only when they reflect on a second body of research documenting the socialization of gender will they have the information they need to design effective programs.
According to this extensive research, the reality is that women and men are not significantly different from each other in ability. (See, for example, Clark, 1995; Thorne, 1993; Nicholson,
1992; Mullis, 1991; Fry, 1990; National Science Foundation, 1990). Research on cognitive structure, for example, shows that the genders are essentially similar (Keating, 1990; Linn and
Hyde, 1989). In virtually every study using statistically-based research on gender differences,
“within-gender variation is greater than differences between men and women taken as groups”
(Thorne, 1993, p. 104).

The research does show some differences in skills that develop out of inequities in opportunity and experience for women and girls compared to men and boys. Boy soccer-players, for example, play soccer games (on average) two years longer than girl soccer-players. The greater science proficiency in boys compared to girls is generally attributed to the fact that more boys than girls enroll in physics and chemistry, enroll in advanced math courses, and have more experience with science through informal contexts (Linn and Hyde, 1989).
Nonetheless, lack of inherent differences does not mean there are no real differences requiring examination. Assumptions and expectations about gender differences often have powerful effects on how women and men behave. Expectations are lumped together in a set of normative ideas about appropriate behavior and appropriate gender “roles.” They consist of the sociocultural and psychological shaping, patterning, and evaluating of female and male behavior
(Schur, 1984). These culturally defined expectations create a prism in which behavior is evaluated and controlled: people make value judgments about the roles men and women should live up to or the traits they should differentially possess (Pleck, Sorenstein, & Ku, 1993).
These assumptions about gender are prescriptive and proscriptive—not descriptive. They exist quite apart from any inherent capability within an individual male or female or even groups of males and females. Assumptions about gender can also override objective reality about actual differences in ability based on gender. Femininity and masculinity can be seen as powerful fictions or ideas imbued with fantasy and lived as fact (Walkerdine, 1990). In other words, societal expectations and assumptions as transmitted by family, friends, employers, the media, and larger society can predict and even proscribe behavior. Literally, what we think women can and should do and what we think men can and should do affects how they actually behave or perform.
While our expectations affect both men and women, they typically disadvantage women.
Women and girls are socialized for, and restricted to, limited and subordinate options, roles and rewards (Schur, 1984). Additionally, gender expectations of men also limit and restrict them to narrow definitions of masculinity. Although men face negative sanctions when they defy gender prescriptions, women face a double bind that men do not. When women behave according to societal norms, they receive more rewards from society; if they defy those norms, they are criticized and ridiculed for not being “feminine.” While men also bear personal and psychological costs associated with their gender limits when they conform to male norms of competence, they are nevertheless typically still rewarded—socially, economically and politically (as well as personally).
Of course, socially-approved gender behavior is not static. In the last twenty years we have seen a movement by both males and females toward increasingly male behavior. For example, an analysis of studies on responses to the Bem Sex Role Inventory showed that from 1974 to 1994 there has been a rise in scores on traits socially defined as "masculine" for both men and women; but there has not been a comparable rise in scores on traits defined as “feminine” (Twenge,
1997). This result “reflects a general trend in gender stereotypes which allows women to adopt masculine roles while prohibiting men from taking on more feminine ones” (Twenge, 1997, p.
316). While this shift has some initial benefit for girls and women (in that they can choose to behave in masculine ways), in the long term it reinforces and sustains the male-centered idea that masculine traits and roles are more valuable than feminine ones.

Differing expectations typically translate into differing treatment. If it is assumed that women and men will behave in certain ways, they will be treated accordingly and gender assumptions take on a life of their own. Sociologists call this a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Since women and men almost always want to be seen as appropriately feminine or masculine and are rarely willing to risk social censure, they often adapt their behavior to fit social expectations. Assumptions about the distinct abilities and interests of women and men often serve to limit their opportunities to experience a broad range of activities.
Typically, the main barrier to clear thinking about gender differences is insistence on perceiving a simple male/female duality when the reality is much more complex. It is very seductive to think of gender differences in stark terms—to assume either that men and women are quite different from one another or they are just the same. This same/different model is a trap for girls and women, because whenever similarity or difference prevails, the model invariably compares women to men. If women are found to be different [then] they are found inferior. And if women are seen as the same as men [then] those differences [that really do exist] are ignored. In either case, men are the gold standard.
The fact is that gender is not a duality and gender differences do not conform to a simple either/or dichotomy.
Research has shown few inherent differences that predetermine behavior; moreover, there are tremendous variations within each gender—much broader than the average differences between genders. Thus, any particular woman or man might fit or totally defy gender expectations. There are some gender differences based on life experiences, often deriving from life experiences shaped by gender norms. (For example, we expect a girl to cook, we teach her how to cook, and then she knows how to cook. We expect a boy to use a hammer, we teach him how to hammer, and then he knows how to hammer.) We expect a man to be assertive and we reward him when he asserts himself; we expect a woman to be caring toward others and we reward her when she cares.
What Do We Look For in Effective Programs?
In evaluating programs to determine whether they are working effectively for women and girls, funders need to look at three important considerations: equity of access , equity of treatment , and equity of outcome . In their useful report "What's Equal? Figuring Out What Works for Girls in
Coed Settings” (1993), Girls Incorporated offers a way to think about each of these equity concerns.
First, Girls Incorporated explains their main principle for working with girls in a coeducational setting. They argue that coed programs must be gender-sensitive, not gender-blind. "Leveling the playing field is more than simply opening more doors for girls and giving equal treatment to girls and boys; it is transforming the way we look at gender as it relates to girls' and boys' development" (p. 3). "Effective strategies for working with girls in coed settings will specifically take gender socialization into account” (p. 3).
Equity of access means that a program provides women and girls equal opportunity with men and boys to participate in programs and activities. Programs will not necessarily achieve equity of access simply by opening the door to both genders. They must ask (and answer) several hard

questions. For example, What are the subtle and overt messages that invite and encourage women and girls? What messages keep them away? Is the program located in an area where females are comfortable traveling? If the program works with mothers, does it respond to the childcare issues these women face on a daily basis?
Equity of treatment means that a program offers the same level and quality of attention and resources. Some coed programs may argue that they make equal resources available to boys and girls, but that boys take better advantage of those resources. They may need to ask whether the same treatment is enough if there are unequal groups to begin with. How do we ensure, for example, that girls have the opportunity and support to become interested and skilled in nontraditional areas such as computers and working with tools, or sports? "'Average' girls are two years behind 'average' boys in team sports skills due to differences in informal practice opportunities" (Nicholson, 1992, p. 16). The result of this gap is that coed sports opportunities typically prove to be ineffective.
Equity of outcome is perhaps the most important but also the most elusive measure. To assess this, programs must ask, What is the gap between females and males in achievement, knowledge, confidence, persistence and participation? Due to gender discrimination and inequitable treatment, girls may require more time and resources or different strategies to break through barriers and become equal contributors to society.
The Relevance of Gender in Youth Programs
Thus far I have offered a set of arguments for why gender matters in program design, implementation and leadership. In order to test out these arguments in actual programs, I spent four years studying coeducational youth programs. What became obvious in my research was that gender matters very much.
Effective coed-youth programs were the exception: unfortunately, relatively few programs (2 of 25) acknowledged and then challenged gender norms and stereotypes.
Unfortunately, most programs failed to do so—with considerable consequences for the girls.
On a typical school-day afternoon, at least 75 young people stream into the Boys and Girls
Center, a youth program located in an urban neighborhood in the Greater Boston area. The
Center strives to be an inviting alternative to “hanging out” on the street or going home to an empty house. It offers a myriad of activities, mostly designed to let young people have fun and expend pent-up energy they cannot release at school. While there is much to praise about the
Boys and Girls Center, a closer look raises some troubling questions.
Boys cluster in the middle of one room, playing pool and ping pong, vying for a turn to play a video game and dividing up into knock-hockey teams. They pay no attention to the girls, who sit in small groups around the edge of the room, talking with each other and occasionally watching the boys’ activities. In the gymnasium next door, boys play basketball on one side and wrestle each other on the opposite side. The girls sit up on the stage, again talking quietly in small groups. In this program, there are about three boys to every girl, and the experiences that girls and boys are having here are very different from each other.

At the Neighborhood House, in another area of Greater Boston, the scene is quite different: in this program, there is almost an equal number of girls and boys. On one side of the gym, eight girls and two boys play volleyball together. On the other side, a lively basketball game is being played, mostly with boys, but it is clear that the stellar player is one of the girls. In another area, girls and boys are sitting at computers, completing their homework. The computer area is run by one of the older girls in the program—the acknowledged computer expert. If anyone—male or female, young person or adult—needs help with one of the computers, they know she is the one to ask. Both boys and girls in this facility look engaged and content and there are smiles all around. Why? What makes this program, similar in aims and activities, so different from the first program in terms of how girls (and boys) participate?
Over the four-year period that I studied coed-youth programs like the Boys and Girls Center and the Neighborhood House, I observed their activities, talked to the staff and to many young people in their programs. The major conclusion I drew was disturbing: many coed programs failed to meet their own stated primary goal: to serve girls as effectively as boys. On the one hand, many programs seem to be based on false assumptions about gender differences that did not reflect an accurate assessment of the young people in their programs. Conversely, program staff often lacked an understanding about how real gender differences in the lives of boys and girls—differences based on unequal opportunities and experiences—affect their participation in these programs. Program staff failed to examine program activities to ask whether girls and boys might bring different skills and interests to their participation in those activities. Too often the result was a mismatch between the program's design and the girls' interests and concerns— a mismatch that caused girls to be marginalized, their needs to be unmet, and their potential to be unrealized.
This mismatch is no small matter for girls. About 71% of young people in the United States participate in some type of youth program every week and an overwhelming number (in some areas, as high as 99%) of those programs are coed (Girls Inc., 1994). Most girls are participating in youth programs; virtually all in coed programs. The systematic failure, therefore, by coed programs to work effectively for girls is a major concern for anyone interested in girls and their potential.
Trends in Youth Programming Have Disadvantaged Girls
Although there have been two positive trends in youth programming in the past 20 years, the net result, unfortunately, has been detrimental to girls. The first trend is that today most youth programs today focus on identifying and strengthening a wide range of positive characteristics in young people rather than operating on a deficiency model that isolates and remediates a specific negative trait. While some programs focus on physical development, some on social skills, and still others teach job-related skills, there has been a shift in focus toward the healthy development of young people and away from the remediation of any specific problem. Most youth programs today have a common goal: namely, helping each individual young person to develop her/his full potential. This universal approach of developing everyone’s potential might be expected to benefit all young people, girls and boys, but it does not. The second major trend in youth

programming, a shift from single-sex to coed programming, has lessened the potential benefit of this universal developmental approach for girls.
A brief history of how and why this shift occurred suggests why girls lost out. Ironically, the shift toward coed programs was initiated partly by a concern about a lack of youth programming for girls. When most programming was single sex, the great majority of programs were only for boys. To ensure equal treatment, formerly all-boy programs opened their doors to girls. But there was also a cost-efficiency concern that motivated the move toward coed programming.
Those who funded youth programs and those who ran them were concerned about the need to provide the best programming with limited resources. To many of these people it made no sense to have separate programs for girls and for boys with equivalent facilities. Both demands that youth programs operate more equitably and cost efficiently could have met by a collaborative strategy between single-sex programs. But once the staff of all-boy programs realized that they could also serve girls, most of them then began eliminating the all-girl programs. Programs that chose this strategy then gained the advantage of becoming the primary youth-serving agency in their area.
The history of the Boys Clubs and their transformation to Boys and Girls Clubs of America is illustrative. The Boys Clubs could have pursued a collaborative strategy with the Girls Clubs since each organization brought to the table a strong record of effective programming for girls or boys. The two entities could have merged in a way that would have allowed their respective strengths to manifest. Instead, Boys Clubs went to court to win the right to their new name and to force the Girls Clubs to change their name to "Girls Incorporated." While Girls Incorporated continues to be a strong national organization providing services to girls, virtually all coed programming, however, is now provided by a formerly all-boys agency.
This history is important because it exemplifies the way in which much of today’s coed-youth programming is pasted on top of a formerly all-boys model, and my research shows the results.
Most of the coed programs I studied place the needs and interests of the boys first, are better designed for boys, and are more popular with boys. Program participation rates are also revealing. Both a study of youth programs in New York City and a national study of youthserving agencies found that, on average, coed-youth programs serve three times more boys than girls (The New York Women's Foundation, 1996; Gambone & Arbreton, 1997).
Today, what this means is that as youth programs are converting to a more promising developmental model, most girls are still in coed programs that don’t implement that model effectively for them. As the skills of young people are being developed and they are learning to regard themselves as future contributors to society with exciting options to pursue, girls are missing out.

How Coed Youth Programs Fail Girls
The 25 programs that I studied embodied four distinct sets of gender practices. As a result,
I developed categories to capture these differences, defining them by two factors. First, the assumption inherent in the program design about gender differences in girls and boys. Second, the ways that the program activities interact differently with girls’ and boys’ socialization and life experiences. The four categories I devised were (1) Differences Are Fundamental ; (2)
Males Are the Model ; (3) We Are All the Same ; and (4) Equal Voices . These categories operate on a continuum from least effective to most effective, but only one category, Equal
Voices, is fully effective for girls . Additionally, these Equal Voices' programs fostered the healthy development of boys as well.
Twelve of these 25 programs fall into the Differences Are Fundamental category. These programs assume young women and young men are inherently different in temperament, abilities, and interests. Typically, these programs reinforce the most traditional gender stereotypes because their program activities are designed in response to quite conventional notions about the needs and strengths of boys and girls. In these programs, young men are most often the actors and the doers, engaged in conventional “boy” activities such as sports, playing video games, working with computers, or building mechanical devices. The young women in these programs are often the watchers and the observers—assuming passive roles that do not reflect their development potential. Alternatively, they may be involved in “girl” activities like arts & crafts or socializing with each other.
What is rare in these programs is finding girls and boys participating equally in any task or activity. When asked about the obvious gender differences in who does what, staff members of these programs generally responded, “That’s the way girls are. We try to get them to [play basketball, build a model car, write a computer program, etc.], but they don’t want to.” In almost every interview I conducted with staff in these programs, they assumed that the problem (if any) lay in the girls and their lack of interest in participating in boys’ activities. They never questioned any of the structures in place that funneled boys toward one set of activities and girls toward another. Nor did they question why the boys were not participating in the so-called girls' activities. In other words, the girls were compared to the boys and found lacking.
Equal Voices' programs, at the other end of the continuum, also assume that there are significant differences between young women and young men, but that these differences are not innate and incapable of change. Rather, they locate the differences between genders in socially-created meanings of gender that are limiting to both girls and boys. The two Equal Voices' programs
I identified in my study recognize that young women often have unequal access to opportunity relative to young men. These programs work to make both genders aware of these social constraints, and, most critically, encourage active questioning of them. So, Equal Voices' programs acknowledge that there may be some need for different programs for young women and young men, but they believe these programmatic considerations are driven by differences in life experience, not inherent differences in male and female constitutions.

In these programs, I saw young women and young men participating as equals in many activities, as well as involved in activities that defy gender stereotypes. In one instance, boys agreed to carry out many behind-the-scenes tasks for a major event, while girls took on the public leadership roles. In another instance, several girls and boys acted as security monitors for a youth rally. Previously, only boys would have filled those roles: but the girls said that they were just as good as boys in defusing a potentially explosive situation. It turned out they were right.
The two programs in the middle of the continuum— Males Are the Model and We Are All the
Same —assume sameness between the genders. They are an improvement over Differences Are
Fundamental programs in that they offer, at least on the surface, equal opportunity to young women and young men to participate in all the activities of the programs. They are not grounded in such stereotypes as young men like to “do” and young women like to “watch.” However, because neither of these program categories includes an active challenge to a male standard, they operate in ways that benefit young men at the expense of young women. They "privilege" the male experience over the female. Moreover, they don’t do their best by young men either, since current ideas about appropriate masculine behavior and attitudes limit young men also. Only in
Equal Voices' programs can one see these limits being fully explored. Only in Equal Voices' programs are stereotypically "feminine" ways of being valued highly enough so that both young men and young women can develop their fullest potential, choosing from the entire range of human behavior and possibility.
There are important distinctions between the two programs based on the “sameness” idea. The
Males Are the Model program is based on a belief that young women can do anything young men can do. A distinctive feature of the four programs I identified in this category is that their activities are ones to which the average young man brings more skills and experience than does the average young woman. The activities themselves are also often those traditionally thought of as “masculine” rather than “feminine.” (Examples included a bicycle-repair program, a housing- construction program, and a computer clubhouse). In each of these activities, the typical young women had fewer skills when she started as well as the additional challenge of participating in a program that defies gender norms for girls. Young women were allowed (and often even encouraged) to participate in these programs, but they had to participate as equals , despite the fact that their skills were not equivalent to those of the young men. The fallout from these programs is that young women drop out at a much higher rate. They view themselves—and are viewed by other participants and even staff—as being less successful in the program. When young women fail to do well in these programs, their failure reinforces the myth that girls really cannot do everything boys can do.
The seven programs I identified that operate with a We Are All the Same assumption begin to acknowledge unequal opportunity for girls. They work very consciously to involve girls and boys equally and treat them identically. A distinctive feature of these programs, and one that distinguishes them from Males Are the Model programs, is that their activities are not traditionally male or female. Nevertheless, male behavior is still the gold standard and it is assumed that boys and girls have the same experiences and value the same male-defined goals. (In short, young women are encouraged to emulate young men but young men are not taught to emulate young women.) On one occasion, the young people decided to develop a set of activities to address youth violence. While everybody agreed that gang violence was an important

component of their work, the girls could not convince the boys to see that relationship violence was equally important. In another example, at a youth rally planned by a We Are All the Same program, young women and young men shared the several visible leadership roles at the event.
They gave speeches and moderated activities in equal numbers. Yet only the girls got involved with the less glamorous, behind-the-scenes work such as buying food and ordering supplies.
Without Careful Attention to Gender, Programs Simply Aren’t Effective
In 23 of the 25 programs I studied, gender practices conflicted with the stated goal of the program to develop young women and young men to their fullest capacities. In the 12
Differences Are Fundamental programs, young men and young women were channeled into very different activities within the same program based on untested assumptions the staff made about inherent gender differences in interest and ability. (Many of these programs began as allmale.) Most activities offered by these programs therefore were once designed solely with boys in mind. The result is that there is often less for girls to do in the programs and few ways for girls to break into the boys’ activities.
In the 11 programs that believe in gender “sameness” not “difference” ( Males Are the Model and We Are All the Same ), girls often struggle to succeed, because the hidden reality is that their programs “tilt” toward boys. In Males Are the Model programs, a “sameness” orientation masks real gender differences. The young people generally participate in identical activities with identical structures and supports. But in a career preparation program, for example, the young people were learning skills that the young men (on average) already possessed to some degree before they joined the program. Here, the less-skilled young women were disadvantaged by identical treatment. In We Are All the Same programs, an insistence on gender “sameness” also came at a cost to the girls. Despite best efforts, these programs were unsuccessful in showing how superficial equality ignored very real underlying differences.
Youth development programs have the capacity to make a more positive and constructive contribution to maximizing the potential of girls—and boys. First, they can bring their program design more in line with actual established differences (or lack of differences) in ability and interests between young women and young men. Second, they can work with both genders to examine and explode limiting assumptions about appropriate gender traits and roles. Third, they can adjust their program design so both young women and young men can participate effectively in all the program activities. In this way, the programs will truly prepare young people for the multiplicity of roles they will actually encounter in their adult lives.
At one time, there were many more all-male youth programs and all-female youth programs.
This was due, at least in part, to traditional and essentialist notions of gender differences and appropriate behavior. These single-sex programs for young women did allow them some opportunity to participate and develop in an arena free from competition with or comparisons to young men. Today, there are many pressures on youth programs to be coeducational. The push to make programs coed may have created superficial changes that disguise the underlying reality.
Several [ostensibly] coed programs I examined are essentially designed for young men.

Appropriate attention to gender issues does not happen simply because a program for young people intends to benefit (or even equally benefit) young women and young men. Rather, in important ways, a program is shaped and constrained by the gender ideas it embodies—ideas that become self-fulfilling prophecies and develop into institutionalized practices containing gender bias harmful to girls and young women. Simply having an equal number of young women and men in the program, adding women to the [male] staff, or allowing the girls to do everything boys do, does not result in a program that benefits both genders equally. Unless a program examines its gender practices, assesses the needs and interests of young people, and analyzes the barriers to access that may exist for young women, it will probably work less well for young women than young men. And in the long run, it will also limit the development of young men.
Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
As the above research shows, programs need to analyze gender differences in life experiences, opportunities and social roles if they want to be as effective for women and girls as for men and boys. What will not work is analyzing gender in isolation from other categories of social group membership. In the last few years, an important new area of scholarship has arisen to analyze the interconnection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This work has clearly shown that two or more categories of meaning exist and interact simultaneously. These categories affect individuals and groups of individuals and they are also historically and contextually located.
Race, class, gender and sexuality hierarchies are never static and fixed: they constantly undergo change as part of new economic, political, and ideological processes, trends, and events.
Race, class, gender, and sexuality are social constructs whose meaning develops out of group struggles over socially-valued resources (Weber, 1998). The dominant culture defines the categories within each construct (race, class, gender, sexuality) as polar opposites (white/black; men/women; heterosexual/homosexual; etc.) to create social rankings: good and bad. It also links these concepts to biology, to imply that the rankings are fixed, permanent, and embedded in nature. In reality, these concepts are neither polar opposites nor biologically determined; rather, they are systems of power relationships; historically specific, socially constructed hierarchies of domination. Therefore, gender as a category has no meaning apart from the categories of race, class and sexuality. All these categories impact the life experiences and opportunities of people.
We need to pay attention to the multiple and interactive effects of these social-group memberships in program design and implementation, and, therefore, foundations need to do the same in their grantmaking.
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide detailed evidence of the varieties of intersections of these social-group memberships, I do want to clarify that the simultaneous existence of these categories means that foundations cannot adopt a single-gender lens to ensure effective grantmaking. Rather, they need to ask several questions of both their grantmaking and the programs they fund. How does gender impact the experiences and opportunities of the constituents of their grantees? How does race impact experiences and opportunities as well?
And what about class and sexuality? In other words, foundations need to apply several interlocking lenses in their grantmaking. Or, more concretely, they need to ask very specifically,
Who are the different people involved in and impacted by the issue(s) we care about? How do

gender, class, race and sexuality shape who those people are, what their needs and interests are, and what their concerns and issues are? Finally, How can all these people be actively involved in working on the issues we all care about?
Universal and Targeted Programs and Funding
To ensure that effective programs for women are developed and then funded, the inevitable debate has been whether or not these programs (and their funding) need to be "targeted" (solely to women) or need to be “universal” (aimed at both women and men). For many years it was generally assumed that programs had to be targeted to be effective. My work [and that of others concerned about gender equity and funding] typically focused on foundation funding for programs designed specifically for women and girls. Although none of us said that meant programs only for women and girls , in effect we all contributed to a conflation of the two.
This debate has been unnecessary and potentially distracting. The goal should be to fund programs that work well for women, and in this mix, to fund a substantial number of programs controlled by women. As we will see in the following Section on international grantmaking, it is very possible to effectively include women and address their needs with a both/and approach .
This means funding a range of programs—some solely for women and girls and some universal, but designed to work well for women and girls. Before we look at this evidence, supporting this both/and approach, it may be useful to understand how the debate between targeted and universal programs and policies has played out in the United States.
It is generally accepted that targeted programs are more cost effective, can have much better results, and are able to take into account the distinct needs of the recipients. Yet as politicians are quick to note, universal programs garner the most support. Social security, the sacred cow of
American public policy, has garnered so much support that recent measures to alter its makeup are always stunted by voter (and lobbyist) outcries. Indeed, universalists claim that without widespread political support, programs designed to alleviate poverty will be pushed aside.
Citing past policies from the turn of the century, to Reagan-era antipoverty strategies of the
1980s, Theda Skocpol (1991) points to the declining financial support for targeted programs.
Indeed, even supporters of targeted programs readily agree that garnering political support for targeted programs is an uphill battle (Lemann, 1996).
Progressives such as Piven and Cloward also strongly support universal programs, on the grounds that targeted programs (e.g., food stamps and income transfer payments) stigmatize recipients. Referring to the punitive attitudes of the Reagan administration, Piven and Cloward explain: “With the president castigating food stamp cheats, it becomes much harder to hand the stamps to a cashier while standing in a supermarket checkout line” (1982, p. 87). William Julius
Wilson contends that negative stereotypes of welfare recipients are so ingrained in our culture that people believe that the lowest class of people are those that receive welfare (Wilson, 1995).
Indeed, as Michael Katz points out, the image of the "undeserving" poor has infiltrated our policies, creating punitive measures for those who do not fit into our ideas of productive workers
(1989).

Although universal programs may be politically savvy, they have some serious flaws. Because of their wide-ranging nature, universal programs often provide the most benefit to those who are already succeeding or likely to succeed. Universal programs, therefore, spend a considerable amount of money on members of our society who can find other forms of assistance. Furthermore, providing services for everyone is not a cost-efficient way of providing services to those who need them most.
Despite the fact that targeted programs are often cited as having weak political support, Greenstein postulates that this weakness is a result of who is being targeted. If recipients are among the deserving poor, then they are more likely to see continued political support. For example, the
Women, Infants and Children program (WIC)—which offers nutritional benefits and services to low-income pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and young children—has gained strong political momentum. WIC's funding level in 1981 was $900 million. In 1999 it was $2.35 billion—one of the sharpest growth rates of any federal program between 1981 and 1991” (1992, p. 445).
Because our society accepts (to some degree) that young children and pregnant women should receive nutritional supplements (if necessary), WIC has maintained a steady base of support.
Additionally, targeted programs that offer assistance to those who “earn” it are also popular.
For instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) passed with little opposition because it
“was presented as an earned benefit available only to low-income families that worked and was designed to reward them for their effort” (p. 447). Indeed, the “political weakness” of targeted programs is “more accurately ascribed to cash welfare programs for people who are not elderly, are not severely disabled, and do not work or work very little" (p. 450). In addition, Leman notes that although the civil-rights movement was not favored by most politicians, eventually it gained political support and policy changes were made. Although Leman realizes that acquiring support is important in the long term, he believes that it should not be a significant consideration when developing new programs and policies (1996).
Unlike universal programs, which offer the same service to everyone—regardless of their race, cultural heritage, income level, education, or gender—targeted programs can be designed to meet the specific requirements of their target group (Schorr, 1988, p. 286). In a critique of welfare programs prior to1990, Pearce claims that the current policy is based on the “Male Pauper
Model.” Because the gender of recipients was not taken into account when designing these policies, politicians have created a series of work requirements without providing appropriate childcare vouchers. Additionally, these programs do not value women’s work in the home as mothers, childcare workers, and housekeepers. Yet only a targeted program would be able to provide services directly for women. As Pearce contends, “developing and advocating agendas by, for, and with poor women that are built around a recognition of interdependence, the value and importance of women’s work to society, and the institutional character of gender discrimination is essential.” (1992, p. 277). Or, as Elwood and Summers explain, because the problems of the three groups [single-mother families, the disabled, and minority youth] are so different and the consequences of aid vary so greatly, continued reliance on a categorical approach to offering aid to the disadvantaged seems appropriate...A complex policy is required to balance the needs of children, the rights of mothers to care for their children, and the desire of society (and the mothers themselves) for recipients to be self-sufficient (1986, p. 103).

Because targeted programs can be shaped to meet the specific needs of their recipients, they will have a much more effective outcome if they succeed (1994, p. 528). For instance, concentrated efforts to raise the elderly out of poverty were very effective when an intensive, comprehensive, targeted strategy was employed (Schorr, p. 289). Furthermore, even less popular targeted programs (and targeted groups) have shown promise. Danziger, Havemeann and Plotnick’s analysis of pre-transfer poverty during the 1970s and 1980s shows that directly targeted “income transfers were increasingly effective in reducing poverty” (1986, p. 5). Similarly, Starr notes that infant mortality rates have decreased (and continue to do so) since the inception of Medicaid and other health programs targeting low-income mothers (Danziger, 1986).
Theda Skocpol has come to advocate what she calls "targeting within universalism" (1991).
What this consists of is extra benefits within universal policy frameworks that disproportionately help less privileged people. Political opposition to income distribution is partially muted by aid programs that provide something for everyone, albeit differing amounts relative to need.
In the final analysis, I think that both targeted and universal programs and funding can work well for women. There really are three possible types of program designs: gender-sensitive, genderspecific, and gender-blind. A gender-sensitive program is a coeducational program that takes into account the different needs [that women and girls have vs. men and boys] in the design and delivery of their activities. A gender-specific program is a single-sex program intentionally designed to respond to specific needs and strengths of the females or males that it serves.
A gender-blind program can be universal or single-sex, and it does not take gender issues into account in the design or delivery of its activities. I conclude therefore that only the gender-blind programs will not work well for women and girls.
What Should Foundations Do?
Based on current research, they should fund a mix of effective programs. Evidence supports the need for gender-specific programs for women and girls as well as coeducational programs that pay appropriate attention to gender . Nevertheless, current funding percentages do not, on the face of it, appear to be justifiable: 92% coed, 6% all-female and 2% all-male. The funding for all-female programs seems especially low, given the current evidence about the ways in which coeducational institutions serve females less well than males. Preparing males and females to be participating members of an equitable society requires that close attention be paid to today's continuing inequities.

In a 1992 essay for Scientific American , Lawrence Summers, then-chief economist at the World
Bank, wrote that “educating girls quite possibly yields a higher rate of return than any other investment in the developing world” (p. 132). He reasoned that most girls go on to become mothers and “an educated mother faces an entirely different set of life choices. She is likely to have fewer, healthier children, and can insist on the development of all her children.” Summers’ essay (together with speeches he made in the 1990s), advocating for an investment in girls had a major impact on international development. It provided an economic rationale for why one of the most influential institutions in the world should “invest” in girls. Simply stated, Summers was convinced that institutions like the World Bank should invest in girls because that investment pays off. He concluded that it pays off more than any other investment the Bank could make, because of the subsequent effect on women’s wages, because of the decisions more educated women make about having children, and because of the greater capacity of an educated woman to raise healthy, educated children who themselves go on to make good wages, choose smaller families, and invest in their children.
Background
Although Summers’ essay was published in 1992, international development agencies had known for a long time that it was necessary to consider women in their grantmaking. Indeed, they have focused on women as a distinct population for at least the last forty years. Over that time there has been a considerable evolution--in both grantmaking discourse and practice--in why it is important to focus on women and how to best do so. What is beyond dispute is that the consideration of gender is solidly established in all mainstream international development agencies, including the United Nations; the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund;
USAID, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Why is gender analysis so solidly entrenched in international development? Why are institutions such as USAID and the World
Bank focused so unapologetically on the needs of women? Since this state of affairs is such a marked contrast to the majority of domestic grantmaking, what lessons can international development practice offer? This section explores these questions.
Forty Years of Focus
Women were first targeted for special attention in international grantmaking in the 1950s and
60s. At this time, targeted funding for women was designed to bring women into the development process as better mothers. There was little recognition of women’s multiple roles in society but, instead, a narrow and shortsighted focus solely on women’s role in the family, specifically her role in childbearing and parenting. In these early decades women were viewed as passive beneficiaries of development, not as active agents of their own lives or as major contributors to their communities or countries. It was assumed that women needed assistance and had little capacity to assist themselves. During this time the specific gender needs of women were met through the provision of food aid and family planning. Because women were treated as passive recipients of aid, and because only the reproductive role of women was recognized,

this phase of targeted support for women has come to be known as the Welfare Approach
(Moser, 1993). (As Summers’ comments in Scientific American attest, even as late as 1992 there was often a disproportionate emphasis on girls’ future reproductive role, with a much smaller emphasis on their role in the economy).
A major drawback of the welfare approach is that women—not lack of resources--were identified as the problem. Women were not making “good” choices about family size and thus needed to be offered (or sometimes forced to accept) family planning services. Women were not providing adequate nutrition for their families and thus had to be supplied additional food. There was virtually no recognition of women’s multiple roles in the productive, and community spheres, nor was their any acknowledgment of the fact that women often lacked access to adequate material resources or political power. Assistance was also provided in a top-down manner that ensured women’s continued dependence on aid, since they were not given resources allowing them to construct adequate lives for themselves or their families.
Widespread dissatisfaction with the welfare approach emerged in the 1970s. Scholars in the field of international development (such as Goetz, Kabeer, Moser, and Staudt) attribute this dissatisfaction (as well as the alternative approaches that emerged) to a confluence of factors.
These include: the emergence of a diversity of women’s organizations in developing countries that began to demand a larger role for women in the development process; the research efforts of cultural anthropologists (particularly Ester Boserup) who were beginning to make visible not only women’s multiple roles in the productive, reproductive, and community spheres of activity, but also the negative impact of development on women’s lives; and the growth of the women’s movement in the United States and its attention to women’s condition in developing countries.
An early outgrowth of these interactive forces was the UN International Women’s Year
Conference of 1975. This conference formally put women on the international “agenda” and provided legitimacy for the many efforts to advocate for a focus on improving the lives of women and recognizing women’s integral role in the development process. The conference, in turn, led to the UN designating 1976 to 1985 as the “women’s decade.” The United Nations
Decade for Women continued to highlight the important but often invisible role of women in the social and economic development of third-world countries.
Women in Development (WID)
Thus, in the 1970's, a whole new focus on women emerged in the international development field, which came to be called Women In Development (WID). The term WID was coined by the Women’s Committee of the Washington D.C. chapter of the Society for International
Development. The members of this society had been paying close attention to the work of Ester
Boserup and others who were documenting the distinct roles occupied by women and men in most developing countries. Boserup’s work was revolutionary because it changed prevailing concepts about women’s economic roles in modernizing agricultural societies (Moser, 1993).
She argued that women played a central role in food production, and that their status was integrally connected to their agricultural contributions in their respective societies.

Boserup concluded that modern development was problematic for women in two major ways.
First, it ignored women’s central role in the production of food. Second, it marginalized women even as it was supposed to be improving their lives. Boserup documented, for example, the ways in which the introduction of more modern technologies of food production made it almost impossible for women to continue their work in the agricultural sector. This, in turn, reduced women’s status in their societies and, thus, their freedom. Given women’s important role in agriculture, modern technologies should have been made available to them as well as to men.
However, because of Western notions about appropriate sexual division of labor, when new technologies were introduced, only men were trained to use them. This is a classic example of how Western thinking served to make women invisible. Women in the Society for International
Development came to realize that the modernization methods they had helped push for had actually set women back. Once they understood this they began to push for a more equitable approach to development.
Women in Developing Countries
During this same time period, American women were advocating for more political recognition of the role of women in developing countries. They achieved a major legislative success with the passage of the 1973 Percy Amendment to the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act. This legislation mandated that US assistance help move women into their national economies in order to improve women’s status and assist the development process. One direct result of the Percy Amendment was that WID was officially adopted by the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) as their women and development approach.
USAID not only implemented WID in their own practices; they also [along with the Harvard
Institute of International Development] developed a case-study methodology to identify how women were being left out of development. These case studies provided much of the evidence to conclude that a specific and constructive focus on women was necessary to ensure the effectiveness of development programs. USAID and the Harvard Institute were able to demonstrate very specifically, country by county and region by region, how women are key actors in the prevailing economic system and how their neglect by development plans failed to tap into their potentially large contributions.
In these case studies, their approach was to analyze women’s contributions to the economic growth of a country; document women’s formal and informal labor force participation; look at what happens when women control income; and document women’s contributions to the supply of food. One important finding, in virtually every developing country, is that when women have control over some or all of the income of the household, they use that income for their children’s nutrition and the family’s basic human needs. This contrasts markedly with the majority of men, who use increased income to improve themselves rather than their families (Blumberg, 1991).
When women control some income they also have increased decision-making power in the household regarding childbearing, economic issues, and family welfare. What the case study method was able to do, in other words, was provide evidence for the need to consider gender and show the benefits of doing so.

Since the 1970s, a dramatic shift has occurred, away from the initial paternalistic approach to women’s development. Approaches to women in development have taken different forms in different grantmaking institutions and have evolved different rationales for why a focus on women is justified. The differences will be explored in the following pages, but first it is useful to understand two consistent themes that characterize all WID approaches: the first is the recognition that women and men occupy different social roles in every society; and the second is that women are always in the subordinate position.
A central element of WID is the recognition that gender is a social construct. This refers to the fact that women and men have socially defined characteristics which are shaped by historical, economic, religious, cultural, and ethnic factors. As a result of gender characteristics, women and men have different experiences in life, different knowledge, perspectives, and priorities.
Much of the differences arise from the fact that every society assigns different tasks to men and women -- the sexual division of labor. Productive work is done by men and women, but it is often gender segregated. Women occupy certain jobs and job categories in a society, men are in other categories, and there is often little fluidity between those categories.
More significantly, in developing countries women’s productive work is often unpaid. For example, men may be involved in export agriculture while women are raising food for their families. The women’s work is just as necessary, but typically unpaid. There are two results: women do not get access to income, and their productive labor is not counted in any of the national statistics on economic production. Reproductive work , or the work of the family, is mainly done by women. In the third and most recently recognized sphere of activity, community work , both men and women are involved, but once again in very different roles. Men generally do the more public and high-status task; women tend to do the organizing and support work.
This sexual division of labor adds up to women’s often invisible status. Reproductive work in the home is often not recognized or valued. Productive work , especially if unpaid, is similarly not seen or valued. And community work , since women generally operate behind the scenes, does nothing to change the fact that women are unseen and unvalued.
With the introduction of the concept of gender in development planning, recognition is given to the causes for and structures of women’s subordination in society, to their inequality with men, and the power relations involved. Gender analysis emphasizes the context in which women face their problems and stresses the necessity of social change and the need to empower women in this process (Brouwers, 1993). In every developing country, women as a group enjoy fewer advantages and work longer hours than men. In many countries women earn less than men, are prevented from owning land, face numerous obstacles to holding positions of authority, and face many threats of violence just because they are women (Gender and Development Workbook,
1992). Therefore, a starting point of WID is the recognition of women’s different and subordinate position.
Central features of virtually all WID approaches are to make women visible, to recognize their many contributions, to acknowledge their different social roles, and to design development projects that are consistent with these gender differences. The defining differences in WID approaches have to do with the rationales for paying attention to women, the extent to which

women are involved in the development process, not simply beneficiaries of it, and whether the unit of analysis is women or differences in gender roles and status between women and men.
The critique of the paternalistic welfare approach resulted in the development of a number of alternative approaches: equity; anti-poverty; efficiency; and empowerment. These approaches share many origins, were formulated in the same decade, and are not entirely mutually exclusive
(Moser, 1993). Today the efficiency approach is the most widely practiced by mainstream development institutions, whereas the empowerment approach is the most widely advocated by women’s organizations in developing countries.

Equity
The purpose of this approach to development is to gain equity for women in the development process. Those who advocate an equity approach believe that women must be included as active participants in development. This approach recognizes women’s triple role in the productive, reproductive and community spheres, as well as the different roles women hold [vs. men] in each sphere. The equity approach seeks to meet what are referred to as “strategic” rather than
“practical” gender needs through direct state intervention, giving political and economic autonomy to women and reducing inequality with men. This approach challenges women’s subordinate position in relation to men and advocates strategies to change that balance of power.
The equity approach generally assumes that the best path to equity for women is economic independence. The approach has been very controversial because of its emphasis on women’s subordinate position to men and its emphasis on helping women be economically independent from men. Generally it is an approach that has been advocated by women’s organizations in the
United States and is not always well received even by women’s organizations in developing countries. In fact, according to Moser and others it met so much resistance that has been effectively dropped as a significant approach to development.
Anti-Poverty
The anti-poverty approach has been far less controversial than the equity approach because it argues that women’s poverty is the problem of underdevelopment, not their subordination. Thus, it does not focus on power relations between women and men, but on women’s economic status.
Its general approach is to ensure that poor women increase their productivity and receive some of the benefits of that increased productivity. It recognizes the productive role of women and seeks to meet their practical (rather than strategic) gender needs to earn an income particularly through small-scale income generating projects. It is most popular with NGOs other than women’s
NGOs that favor empowerment . It puts the emphasis on reducing income inequality between women and men. This is a toned-down version of the equity approach (Moser, p. 66).
Efficiency
Efficiency is now the predominant WID approach. Its purpose is to ensure that development is more efficient and effective by focusing on women’s economic contribution. The shift from equity to efficiency reflected a specific economic recognition that 50% of the human resources available for development were being wasted or under-utilized. It makes an assumption that increased economic participation for Third World women is automatically linked to increased equity. One major drawback of the efficiency approach is that it relies on the elasticity of women’s time. Women are expected to make major economic contributions with no concomitant reduction in family responsibilities. When structural adjustment policies force countries to curtail social spending, policy makers assume that women can simply carry more of the burden of taking care of others. Efficiency has been especially popular with the World Bank and other institutions that frame their work in economic terms.

Empowerment
The purpose of empowerment is to make women more powerful by making them more able to be self-reliant. A defining feature of the empowerment approach is that women’s subordination is seen not only as the problem of men but also of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. It recognizes women’s triple role in the productive, reproductive and community spheres, and seeks to meet strategic gender needs indirectly through bottom up mobilization around practical gender needs. It acknowledges that women experience oppression differently according to their race, class, colonial history, and current position in the international economic order (Moser, p.
74). It places far less emphasis than the equity approach on increasing women’s status relative to men. Rather it focuses on the capacity of women to increase their own self-reliance and internal strength -- the right to determine choices in life and to influence the direction of change through the ability to gain control over crucial material and non-material resources. This approach has been most popular with women’s organizations in developing countries.
Gender And Development
More recently there has been another major shift in development discourse and practice -- a shift that has recognized the limitation of focusing on women in isolation and has drawn attention to the need to look at gender, not solely at women. This new approach is generally termed Gender
And Development (GAD). The WID framework has come over time to be associated with the analysis of women’s situation independent of men’s and with small-scale, women-specific projects. After 1985 WID was replaced in the development discourse with the term gender; in part because women-specific projects had failed to improve women’s condition. Development scholars such as Oakley and Rubin, among others, were concerned that in the WID approach the problems of women were perceived in terms of their sex (biological differences from men) rather than in terms of their gender -- the social relationship between men and women in which women have been systematically subordinated. They argued for a focus on gender because it forces a look at women in relation to men. The WID approach is based on the rationale that development processes would proceed much better if women were fully incorporated into them. Because it focuses mainly on the needs of women, and fails to analyze women’s status in relation to men, it has the danger of making women seem to be the problem (Moser, 1993). The GAD approach focuses on women’s subordinate status in relation to men. It focuses on gender relations and institutionalized differences in status and access to resources. The GAD approach, then, argues for solutions that increase women’s power and access to the resources the need to provide for their families and sustain their communities.

Incorporating WID into Mainstream Development
All of the major international development institutions have incorporated WID thinking and
WID programming into their development funding. Most development organizations now have an official policy or mandate for WID designed to ensure that they take into account both women’s and men’s needs in the programs they support. They also have an office or an official charged with leading, advising, and reviewing policy implementation. An examination of three institutions, USAID, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the World Bank, helps make clear why these organizations have incorporated and institutionalized WID.
U.S. Agency for International Development
USAID has been the acknowledged leader in WID analysis and practice, institutionalizing WID as early as the mid-1970s. Three factors have affected the evolution of USAID’s concern with gender issues in the development process. The first factor was legislation, namely the 1973
Percy Amendment that required USAID to actively advance the status of women in all of its programs. The second was research findings from developing countries that documented women’s subordinate status and made visible the [often negative] effects of development projects on women. Interestingly, USAID quickly became the source of much of that research, first carrying out the case studies discussed above and then incorporating the results of those case studies in subsequent approaches to development. Finally, key staff within USAID became active advocates for the WID approach and then important sources of increasingly sophisticated thinking about how best to include women in development and improve their status in their respective countries.
Since the mid 1970s, USAID has developed an increasing recognition of the ways in which differential access to and control over resources as well as gender specific responses to opportunities must be addressed if programs and projects are to be successful and efficient.
AID’s concern with gender issues is considered absolutely central to the achievement of the agency’s primary objectives.
In its 1996 “Gender Plan of Action,” USAID reiterates its current commitment to women and its pride in having taken “a leadership role in the donor community in focusing on the crucial role of women in advancing social and economic development.” In his introduction to the plan, J. Brian
Atwood, Agency Administrator, offers unequivocal language both for what USAID has accomplished (in terms of gender) and how much more remains to be done.
More than twenty years ago the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) officially recognized the critical role of women in development by establishing an Office of Women in Development. This was only the first step in a long journey to fully address gender issues in USAID programs... During the last several years, USAID has made significant increases in the level of funding directed to programs that directly benefit women and girls. The agency has also launched major new initiatives in the areas of reproductive health for women, girls education, women and micro enterprise, and women’s political participation and legal rights. These represent significant accomplishments. But perhaps the

greatest accomplishment is the increasing realization that for development to be effective, programs must pay attention to the central role of women in the economic and social advancement of a nation (1996, p. 1).
Atwood goes on to acknowledge that the agency has missed opportunities and must do more to recognize the different roles and needs of women and men in development. He proposes, among other things, to:
…always consider the obstacles women face as they attempt to gain access to their own political and legal systems;... consider whether new earnings will be controlled by mothers who -- research has found -- are more likely than fathers to spend it on children’s nutrition; and... modify the Agency’s Strategic framework to reflect the key role of gender considerations in the achievement of USAID goals (p. 1).
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
In 1987, IDB approved its operating policy on WID and appointed its first WID advisor in 1989.
According to a 1995 account of WID at the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank, 1995), the underlying motivation for the IDB to focus on women is the core belief that the goal of economic and social development cannot be achieved unless both women and men are able to participate fully in all spheres of life, unhindered by discrimination. What follows from this belief is the recognition at IDB that understanding gender differences is central to development planning.
IDB has an unusually sophisticated understanding of the rationales for WID, acknowledging equity, efficiency, and empowerment rationales. It holds that, to be successful, WID must balance efficiency (stressing women’s contributions to development) and equity (stressing women’s benefits from development). It must also give women more access to power.
Gender analysis is undertaken because it can promote the just distribution between men and women of the costs and benefits of development. A clear understanding of differing needs, interests, access to resources and work of women and men can greatly facilitate development planning and promote economic growth. Finally, gender analysis is seen as an important tool in the promotion of women’s and men’s participation in development.
The objective of IDB’s WID policy is to integrate women more fully into all stages of the development process and to improve their socioeconomic circumstances. The IDB is committed to recognizing and enhancing women’s actual and potential roles in productive and social activities, as well as their contribution to the national development process.
Although a theoretical commitment to WID is well established at the IDB, the practicalities are daunting. According to the bank’s own analysis of this issue (1995), it is hard to do WID at the
IDB. There are no sanctions for not doing it or rewards for doing it. It also takes specific training, which is often not available or even assumed to be necessary. Despite the problems, there have been some significant successes. In 1991, 6 % of IDB’s loans addressed gender issues in project analysis and included specific actions to improve women’s participation as

contributors or beneficiaries. By 1994, this figure had increased to 33% (Inter-American
Development Bank, 1995).
What accounts for this improvement? Clearly, staff advocates have been an essential element in bringing about this change. Although the presence of large numbers of women has had a positive effect on gender policies, it may not be enough because of other variables, such as organizational structure and culture: incentives to advocate the interests of a particular social group pale in comparison to incentives to conform to organizational systems of motivation and reward.
The World Bank (WB)
The WB has followed, not led, analysis and action on WID issues (Buvinic, 1996). Only in
1994 did it come forward with a policy paper on women—nearly twenty years after it established a WID office. The WB has a broad objective: enhancing women’s participation in economic development. By 1994, the WB became seriously committed to mainstreaming gender concerns into all its operations, rather than operating a parallel or separate set of programs focusing on women (Jahan, 1997).
Analysts inside the WB argue there is much more it could do for women. While considerable gains have been made over the last twenty years, as seen by key social indicators for women, unacceptable disparities in the well-being of women persist, and even less has been achieved with regard to women’s participation in economic and political life. While the WB’s overall efforts to promote economic growth and reduce poverty can benefit women, these measures alone are insufficient to address the many obstacles to women’s full participation in their countries’ development (Buvinic).
In the mid-1980s, serious momentum was felt within the WB for WID. Nonetheless, the WB has done significantly more on behalf of women as mothers than as workers . There is a consensus at the WB regarding the importance of investing in women in the social sector, but no consensus exists regarding women’s roles in economic development. The Bank has done more on behalf of women as mothers than workers. This is shortsighted: investing in women will not only redress inequalities between the sexes but also reduce poverty, raise productivity, and accelerate economic growth. The official estimate is that 30 % of the projects approved between 1988 and
1994 included on paper, specific gender-related actions, up from less than 10 %the preceding decade (Buvinic, p. 19).
Three important concepts are incorporated in the WB’s current discourse: a shift from a focus on women to a focus on gender, a recognition of the need to mainstream gender operations, and an acknowledgment of the importance of participatory project-lending strategies. A gender approach emphasizes the analysis of inequalities between men and women in the family and in society rather than simply focusing on women separate from men. While the gender approach takes the onus off women as being the problem and recognizes the complex set of interactive factors between women and men, it also has some potential dangers. First, it could place too much emphasis on inequalities in the household and not enough on inequalities in society -- the policy, institutional and economic bases for women’s relative and absolute disadvantage. The

second danger is that a focus on gender could dilute explicit attention to women’s needs and result in the diversion of resources to men.
Mainstreaming the Concept of WID
One important evolution that has occurred within development organizations is a move toward mainstreaming WID. This involves a shift away from separate women’s projects or components focused exclusively on women and an integration of WID into every aspect of the organization’s activities. This change was prompted by several forces. First of all, the generally small, women’s only projects often did not work very well. Second, WID activities were being marginalized within development institutions to the point where there were the “real” projects of the organization and then the relatively unimportant women’s projects. Finally, the staff who worked on WID projects were themselves becoming marginalized in their organizations. So, for reasons of project effectiveness and institutional visibility, a move toward mainstreaming WID has occurred. Large mainstream programs continue to represent the principal vehicle for promoting gender equity. However, it has recently been recognized that there is still a need for separate programs for women in certain strategic areas. Women-targeted and gender-targeted approaches can have a big payoff, especially when undertaken as part of an over-all mainstreaming strategy. Those who advocate this “both/and” approach refer to it as modified mainstreaming.
Mainstreaming, as it is currently practiced, can have two broad approaches: “integrationist” and
“agenda setting.” The integrationist approach builds gender issues into existing development paradigms. The result of this is that the over-all development agenda is not is not transformed, but each issue is adapted to take into account women and gender concerns. The agenda setting approach involves the transformation of the existing development agenda with a gender perspective. Women participate in all development decisions and, through this process, bring about a fundamental change in the existing development paradigm.
Lessons Learned
So, what can we learn from the ways in which international development institutions incorporate gender into their programs and their grantmaking? The most obvious conclusion is that a focus on gender is well-accepted in international development. Every major player in international development has as one central element of its work a focus on gender and an institutionalized approach to including gender analyses in its work.
WID (or GAD) is accepted for a number of reasons: the documented ineffectiveness of development projects if programs don’t think about women and include women; the recognition of a significant but often gender-specific contribution of women to a country’s economic development; the acknowledgment of women’s different social roles; and the understanding that women, as a group, are almost always in a subordinate position in each country.
What did it take to make the institutionalization of gender take place? Almost everyone who has studied this question agrees that it a number of converging factors created this major shift in

institutional behavior and thinking. These included: research, legislation, internal actors, and external pressure. Moreover, It is doubtful whether just one or two of these factors would have prompted such a major reorientation.
In its current institutional embodiment the major argument for engaging in WID projects and
WID analysis is the efficiency argument. This is an argument that rests on two major assumptions: that women make a major contribution to any country’s economic well-being and that it pays off to invest in women and design development projects that work well for them.
The strength of the efficiency rationale is that it has a ready audience in mainstream organizations that value economic arguments and are relatively open to reorienting their practice if they can be provided economic arguments for doing so. The downside of resting so much on the efficiency rationale is that it sidesteps issues of fairness and justice. And in those cases where no particular economic benefit can be shown, it may also present a hurdle to design projects that work well for women, or even involve women in a project’s design.
Similarly, the focus on gender rather than on women can be a double-edged sword for women.
On the one hand, a focus on gender gets women out from being seen as the problem. A focus on gender also avoids a direct confrontation with men. When the focus is on improving women’s lives this is often regarded as being at the expense of men. A focus on gender allows for a power analysis that does not necessarily end up pitting women against men.
How Does This Translate to Domestic Grantmaking?
First, it is clear that a focus on women can be well accepted and institutionalized. It does not have to be thought of as either a radical or a marginal set of activities. Second, it is clear that a focus on women is not inefficient; quite the contrary, it is integrally connected to efficiency.
Third, a focus on women is not framed as anti-male. It is framed in terms of making a community work better and be more productive. Finally, a focus on women is not synonymous with women-only programs; on the other hand, there can still be reasons to concentrate specifically on women.
What Is Different in the United States?
Of course, there are some important differences between the domestic context and the international context. These differences must be recognized in order to understand what aspects of gender analysis are appropriate in the United States. The first obvious difference is that the situation of women vis-a-vis men is not as stark in the US as it is in many developing countries.
Women arguably have almost as much access to education as men and, in general, take advantage of those educational opportunities, although there are still troubling gaps in girls’ and women’s presence in science and advanced math classes.
On the other hand, there are also parallels. The labor market in the United States continues to be highly gender-segregated, with women disproportionately represented in the secondary labor market characterized by lower salaries and fewer benefits, and men disproportionately represented in the primary labor market with higher salaries and benefits. Also, women do not

have access to political power to nearly the same degree as men, at least in terms of holding positions of elected office.
The other major difference is that in the United States there is both a confusion about, and conflict over, how gender and race intersect -- a conflict that often results in a zero-sum game between race and gender. International development has not been stymied about whether a focus on women takes away from a focus on issues of racial inequality. In virtually all of these countries, a focus on poor women is also a focus on women who are disproportionately women of color and indigenous women. In the United States, the same relationship does not apply, at least in the minds of grantmakers. Here, the predominant image of a woman is a white, upper- middle-class, professional woman. This image then creates then an [understandable] tension with an agenda of advancing the status of people of color. International grantmaking institutions cannot be a model for us to solve this conundrum. However, as I argued earlier in this paper, we need to understand the ways in which gender and race interact, and not be stuck in gender or race analyses.
Finally, we need to learn from the GAD analysis that has, in some cases, supplanted a women specific focus. Many, perhaps most, programs will always be “universal” if what is meant by that is serving women and men or girls and boys. As we have seen in international grantmaking, mainstreaming is inevitable. But here international institutions can be a very important role model because they do not ignore women or ignore gender in their mainstreamed work. Instead, they conduct very thorough gender analyses in order to understand the different gender roles played by women and men in each area of programming and in order to design programs that work for women and men. In addition, international institutions understand there is also an important role for women focused projects as well. What we need to fine-tune is determining when and how gender is relevant in a particular area of programming and when and how it is not.

What I have argued in this paper is that gender analysis must be institutionalized in foundation grantmaking to ensure that funded programs work effectively for women and girls and involve women and girls in every aspect of their operations. Unfortunately, in domestic grantmaking, gender analysis is far from institutionalized but is, instead, marginalized. The question then becomes how are we to change foundations’ grantmaking behavior? To succeed, I believe any change strategy will have to be comprehensive and multi-dimensional.
Too often we assume that foundations behave completely rationally, always making decisions with a careful calculus about whether the particular decision maximizes the goal of the foundation. Once we assume rationality the strategy to change foundations decision-making behavior revolves around showing them that their decisions are irrational or ineffective.
However, as the research of William Diaz, formerly of the Ford Foundation shows, foundations behave simultaneously in several different ways (1996). An effective change strategy needs to acknowledge and address these multiple approaches.
Diaz argues that foundations are simultaneously driven by rational, bureaucratic and operational considerations, and he has developed a model that helps explain what motivates foundations to behave in the ways they do. The first element of his model, the “Rational Actor,” represents those aspects of foundations that are goal directed and in which the outcomes of their behaviors
(grants) follow from rational choices about specific programmatic or broad social goals (p. 454).
When foundations are behaving in this way their behavior and actions are understood to result solely from rational decision making. A course of action is pursued based solely on the perceived benefit of the consequences of the action.
According to Diaz, rationality, in fact, only partially explains foundation decision-making behavior. Foundations are also driven by what he calls “Bureaucratic Politics.” In this element of his model Diaz argues that “foundation actions reflect the confluence of choices, games, compromises, internal politics, prior decisions, and mere chance (Diaz, p. 456). When we conduct a bureaucratic analysis we recognize that the goals, structure and policies of a foundation emerge from an on-going process of bargaining and negotiating among the major interest groups, often in the competition of staff members for scarce resources.
Diaz adds a third element to his analysis of foundations -- “Organizational Process.” He argues that in large organizations, like many foundations, knowledge, resources, and decision-making authority are divided among various departments. There is no one decision-maker that can coordinate and control all of the actions of the foundation. What drives foundations and explains their decisions in this model are established programs, procedures, and routines. These procedures and routines, in fact, limit the range of options available to the decisionmakers. This last model is particularly powerful because it illustrates how a foundation’s “history and culture, prior decisions and standard operating procedures influence and constrain available options and choices in the present.”
What Diaz concludes, in fact, is that large foundations are unlikely to deviate drastically from prior grantmaking interests and habits. I believe this is also true of many of the smaller foundations that have a strong allegiance to their founder and a board of directors that often makes the final decisions about grant awards.

This multi-dimensional analysis of foundation decision making is borne out by the evidence provided from international foundations about how they came to institutionalize gender analysis in their grantmaking. USAID evolved its concern with gender issues in the development process because of three factors: external pressure in the form of legislation (the 1973 Percy
Amendment) that mandated a focus on gender; an internal evolution in the thinking of key staff; and evidence supplied by findings from research on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of development efforts in developing countries.
Similarly, the Inter-American Development Bank came to adopt Women In Development throughout the institution because of a number of factors: the presence of large numbers of women staff who advocated internally for this approach, external pressure from women’s groups in developing countries; and the fit of WID with the new focus of the bank on poverty reduction strategies.
In other words, no single approach can possibly work to change often large (and even small) well-established foundations that pride themselves on their long histories and established practices. And clearly an approach that assumes that all foundation behavior is rational is bound to fail because it does not take into consideration the organizational and bureaucratic forces that drive decision-making. Instead, it will be necessary to mobilize internal and external pressure on foundations in combination with continued evidence supplied by research on why and how grantmaking improves when women are a central part of the process.
So, where to begin? First, I think it will be helpful to educate “domestic” foundations about the ways in which gender analysis is institutionalized throughout the grantmaking of international foundations. Foundations are not unlike other institutions that worry about doing something too radical or untested. The fact that the incorporation of gender analysis in international grantmaking is so long standing and well thought out can only reassure their colleague institutions that the practice is well respected and well within the mainstream of grantmaking practices. This education is also essential because international grantmaking has 40 years of increasingly sophisticated practice of gender analysis. So, there is much that can and should be learned from this history.
Second, I believe there needs to be work done to build conceptual connections between the rationale for gender analysis in international grantmaking and the rationale within the United
States. Unless these connections are made it will be too easy for foundation leaders to conclude that women’s circumstances especially in newly developing countries are so different from their circumstances in the United States as to be incomparable. In fact, this conclusion is one of the reasons that domestically oriented foundations have been slow to follow the lead of their international colleagues.
Finally, work needs to be done to document those programs that serve women and girls well and those that do not. It is too simplistic to conclude that an all-girl or solely women-focused program will automatically work best for its constituents. However, it is likely that universal programs that pay no attention to gender differences in the populations they serve do not work as well as carefully designed programs that thoughtfully consider the needs and strengths of women and girls. There is a largely unexplored middle ground between “gender blind” coed programs

and programs that work solely with women and girls. This middle ground of coed programs that
[potentially] serves women and girls well needs to be better understood and clearly described so that foundations have a clearer road map for how to fund women and girls.
The one thing that is certain is that gender cannot be ignored if effective grantmaking is to result.
There is simply too much evidence that gender continues to shape our life experiences and opportunities. Women and men who are involved in the issue areas foundations care about are going to be different in some important ways. These differences must be understood and accounted for if foundation grantmaking is to be successful.

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